So we didn’t launch, and it’s been postponed until at least Sunday while they fix what’s essentially a leaky pipe down in Florida. The sim tomorrow indeed got cancelled anyway, since the control center has to protect for a Sunday launch, so now I find myself with an empty Thursday and Friday. If I can work up the motivation to get a few of my less-desirable tasks done, it’ll be a good few days. Still, it’s disappointing to be looking at this:
When I was supposed to be looking at this:
But such is life in the space program. This flight has been pushed back day by day for a month now, which makes it hard to really plan anything significant because “I might be at work.” There’s a Soyuz launch later this month so we know that the shuttle launch opportunity window will have a cutout in it. (We never have a shuttle crew and Soyuz crew at the space station at the same time, though I couldn’t tell you why. Probably just crew size and workload?) If we can’t launch by Sunday or Monday, we’ll probably be in for another few weeks of slip.
In other news, I am climbing back on the horse as far as running and triathlon goes. It’s been too long since I was exercising with any regularity. So I’ve done well — four of the past five days. I ran and rode and ran and rode. Tonight I planned to go running but it looks like the weather might be pretty nasty, so it may turn into an indoor ride on the trainer instead.
They’ve been looking at the possiblity of docking Soyuz while the Shuttle is there for around 6 months or so. It’s mainly a workload problem. When the Soyuz docking is going on, they kind of have to tell the Shuttle crew to go into the US segment and be quiet. They can do transfer, but no robotics or EVA tasks. Since the Shuttle missions are packed full of activities, that ends up putting a crimp in the timeline.