Trip to Houston: The Vomit Comet
UPDATE: You can see pictures from the Vomit Comet here. Unfortunately there are no pictures from the Zero gravity portions of the flight yet, but fear not, those should be coming soon.
Im sitting in the San Diego airport on a lay over waiting for my connecting flight to San Francisco taking full advantage of the free wi-fi, something that all airports should have. It ended up being a pretty wild 10 days (not entirely spent) in Houston. To keep from boring people to tears i’ll split my trip up into at least 3 entrees: the Vomit Comet, Hurricane Ike, and Restaurants, since those three things consumed just about every moment of my trip. Perhaps there will be more entries if i come across something else to write about, but right now the outlook isn’t so good on that.
Riding the vomit comet, after all, was the point of this trip. Four of us from the company flew down wednesday, arriving in the afternoon to Ellington Field to get badged up and find out that all you have to do to get a security clearance is have a driver’s license and know how to spell your middle name (what if you don’t have a middle name?). Thursday the two of us that were to fly had altitude training which involved significant time in an altitude chamber, training out bodies and discovering our symptoms of hypoxia (when your body becomes deprived of oxygen as a result of altitude), as well as lectures and workshops about physiology and methods for avoiding motion sickness. We got to wear fighter pilot style oxygen masks in the altitude chamber, so needless to say the Top Gun jokes were freely flowing from this wanna-be blogger currently overdosing on typos with an unusual keyboard.
Friday was left open to make modifications to our test structure, a task for which we could have used another two or three days. Monday the furious work continued and we walked a team of NASA engineers through our test system and experiment with almost no resistance. A flight flew on Tuesday, but because our hardware was not ready to load onto the plane Monday afternoon, we had to forfeit our first day of flying.
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