this morning bini and i went down to the mpsr to watch the ascent sim. rich has been training marc on the ard (abort region determinator) support console, and marc is to the point now where he doesn’t need rich standing over his shoulder, so rich had time to sit in the back with the two of us and explain the basics of his job. it was cool. they did five runs: one abort-to-orbit, one attempt at an ecal (east coast abort landing) that disintegrated into crew bailout (not good), one tal (trans-atlantic landing) to some place in turkey, and two final runs where they actually got into the desired orbit. rich said we’d have to come back some other time when the trajectory people have more to do; today there were a couple people in other positions that were certifying, so all the problems went to them instead.
it was interesting. it was the first time i’ve watched a sim since…geez, it must be since i worked with the gpo’s, which was…summer 2000? a long time ago. anyway.
tonight i’m headed to the us/mexico soccer game in reliant stadium. it’s sold out, so there will be 70,000+ people there. wow. i don’t think i’ve ever been to an event with that many people. i’m sure there will be many more mexico fans, simply because of the local population and the fact that americans aren’t known for their soccer fanaticism, but i’m excited nonetheless. i feel like i need to go buy a big u.s. flag to drape myself in.
and last night i test rode a bike that some guy is selling on the swap shop (he’s asking $550, which is at least $450 more than the bike is worth, so screw that idea) and then went to the driving range to prepare for next week’s division golf tournament. i did ok for a while, but got worse as the night went on. oh well. i think i did pretty good for only my second time ever swinging a club. now i just need to find some clubs to borrow before next thursday…
