I knew as soon as I woke up this morning that, despite being pretty tired, this was going to be a great day because OPENING DAY IS FINALLY HERE! The Astros play the Cardinals at Minute Maid tonight and I am SO there. Ding dong, winter is over, and baseball is finally back. Hooray for Opening Day!
That alone would be enough to make this a great day. But then I got to work and lucked into an extra seat on an hour-long SMS (Shuttle Motion Simulator) run. We did one ascent, where the entire cockpit rotates 90 degrees such that we were lying on our backs in the seats and then the whole thing shakes to simulate the vibration from the solid rocket boosters. We also did three entries from 50,000 feet. I got to fly one of them, and landed pretty smoothly and successfully and almost on the runway centerline. I did blow the left tire, which apparently is not that uncommon and has actually happened in real life before. The guy who was with us said that I pitched up just a hair too much at the end and ended up floating a bit, then coming down with a slightly harder sink rate than I should. The tire didn’t pop until later though.
Fun fun fun.
Oh I just looked over the sheet they printed out for me and under the Contact Fault Display box it says “WING TIP GROUND CONTACT” and “BODY FLAP SCRAPE”. Um, oops. Of course it also says “MAX XWIND LIMITS EXCEED” and that’s not my fault.
Then I got back to my desk just now to an email saying I’ve been accepted to the MSM program at ISU. This was not really a surprise, but still nice to hear.
