The working-a-mission black hole continues. The fog this morning at 3:00 am was crazy thick — the photo above doesn’t really do it justice because believe it or not, it had THINNED OUT by the time I got to this intersection. I had to drive out of my neighborhood at about 20 mph because I could only see about 30 feet in front of me. I can’t recall ever driving in fog so thick. It was creepy and eerie and combined with the early hour, I was a little freaked out.
Tomorrow we shift back a final half hour and for the rest of the mission, I’ll be waking up at 2 am and starting work at 3 am. I’m feeling reasonably well-rested since we’ve slowly worked our way earlier and earlier, but last night I finally reached the point where I was heading to bed when it was still light outside. That makes it a lot tougher. It also means I don’t get to see Jose for very long when he gets home from work, and we don’t get to eat dinner together, which only adds to the “working-a-mission black hole” effect — where I feel like I am either working or sleeping, and have dropped off the face of the earth otherwise.
It’s amazing what goes into operating the ISS — the amount of maintenance involved, yes, but also just the logistics of keeping track of all the equipment that’s up there. There are constantly vehicles bringing up new supplies so they have to unpack the newly arrived vehicle, find a place to store all that stuff (which is not an easy task these days — the space station is a minimalist’s nightmare), and then repack the vehicle with trash and other items that are no longer needed so they can get rid of it. Just imagine what it would be like if you could only throw out the trash a few times per year and you’ll start to get the picture!
You can obviously get a lot more done with the six extra shuttle astronauts on board, and although there’s already been one extra day added to the mission, it looks like another one is likely too. So while undocking was originally scheduled for Saturday, it may not actually happen until Monday! It’ll be another weekend in the Mission Control Center for me…
