Faster than a speeding bullet
Jan. 19th, 2006 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI watched the launch of the Pluto mission on NASA TV on my laptop this morning. It was mostly very quiet and businesslike, but I did notice one of the guys in charge looking humanly excited, not to say goofy, when the launch was finally approved. It's always a tense moment when the rocket trundles into the sky. No lives rode on this one, but lots of hopes and dreams. I thought back to the disastrous Ariane 5 launch in 1996, and ...
couldn't remember the name of the mission that ended up scattered across a South American swamp, the one that had half my colleagues walking around in stunned misery for a week and turned our biennial departmental dinner into a wake. I hate it when my brain does that -- just loses things that used to be part of the fabric of my life.
Google came to the rescue, of course. It was Cluster, and they managed to rebuild it and get it up in a couple of years on Russian rockets, but that was a bad week for solar system folks.
couldn't remember the name of the mission that ended up scattered across a South American swamp, the one that had half my colleagues walking around in stunned misery for a week and turned our biennial departmental dinner into a wake. I hate it when my brain does that -- just loses things that used to be part of the fabric of my life.
Google came to the rescue, of course. It was Cluster, and they managed to rebuild it and get it up in a couple of years on Russian rockets, but that was a bad week for solar system folks.