by Diane | Jul 14, 2014 | Uncategorised
T-46 seconds.
We could hear the anticipation in the voices crackling over the loudspeaker broadcasting from the control room: a calm voice with its rapid-fire listing of each system, and before the last syllable ended a new eager voice would chime in with “go”.
All systems go for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 launch … until T-46 when a failure in the water system made the voices grow somber. A 30 second launch window doesn’t give a lot of time to fix problems that aren’t found until 46 seconds before it begins, but the voices consulted their manual and started another checklist until time ran out and the crowd deflated.
“What does that mean?” we asked our Vandenberg Air Force Base guide for the day, Chief of Community Relations Larry Hill. “What’s a water system failure?”
He gestured helplessly. “I’m just a trumpet player from Albuquerque.”
He’s more than that, with 24 years of active service behind him, including, yes, playing trumpet in the Air Force Band. But no one had clear answers yet at the public viewing site where our NASA Social participants gathered for the 3 am launch on July 1. Bleary eyed, knowing we’d see little through the fog, knowing a scrub was a possibility but excited to be there, together — our little social media mission with our major access to what many – but not us — would consider a minor launch (as in, unmanned and orbiting Earth rather than sexier Mars).
The fact that many of us had travelled a great distance to attend the pre-launch event and dragged ourselves out of bed to the viewing site in the middle of the night didn’t seem to enter into the decision. We’d even eaten the lucky peanuts and sung a few bars of “The Final Countdown.”
It was later explained as a problem with the Vandenberg launch pad, not the NASA satellite itself or United Launch Alliance’s Delta II rocket that would send it into orbit (US space travel is a cooperative effort between NASA, the air force, and private industry): “The system provides sound suppression to dampen acoustic waves at liftoff and protects a launch pad flame duct.” Right, of course.
“Better a good scrub than a bad launch,” said Stephanie Smith, one of our NASA guides and one of the brains behind NASA’s social media accounts, including Mars Curiosity Rover. And indeed, the disappointment of OCO-2’s one-day delay (it successfully launched 24 hours later) was nothing compared to the devastation of OCO-1’s crash into the ocean shortly after launch in 2009.
A small number of our group – those with more flexible itineraries — stayed for the next day’s liftoff and saw not even the promised red glow through the heavy fog. But we all cheered that launch success, and the continuing news that OCO-2 is operating as expected so far.
It’s personal
This is our mission too, now. Faced with a disinterested media, budget cuts and questionable political support, NASA has turned to Twitter in particular to build an army of social media advocates. Their NASA Social events gather select social media users to get a crash course on a particular mission or project and maybe to witness a launch first-hand (preferably with no crash included).
The day leading up to that early morning, we had been given incredible access to the people behind the machines, from the mission scientists and engineers to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. They were human beings to us now, and we felt their disappointment more keenly than our own.
When Project Architect Randy Pollock started on the original Orbiting Carbon Observatory project – the one that made a bottom-of-the-ocean synchronous orbit — his son was in kindergarten; now he’s an intern at NASA JPL. That’s’ 13 years of Pollock’s life invested in a mission that was lucky to get a second chance. I suppose more important than our need to see the rocket’s red glare was their need to have a long-awaited success.
At the launch pad site we asked questions of NASA Administrator Bolden, who boldly stated that we’ll send humans to Mars by 2030, and encouraged us to share our excitement about our OCO-2 experience widely. The undercurrent, of course, is that future missions are in jeopardy due to current funding cuts.
One measure of our enthusiasm (apart from the number of selfies taken with the rocket) was our eagerness to see the launch from a prime vantage point. One of our group asked what would happen if we witnessed it from this very spot, metres away. Before enumerating the disastrous physical effects of standing too close, former shuttle astronaut Bolden said “I’ve never been this close before. Well actually I have; I’ve been on it.”
When pressed at the social media briefing earlier in the day what one message they’d like to convey, the OCO-2 team said “Science is fun.” They aren’t just words to NASA – they instill a spirit of fun and awe into their social media advocacy.
All that and a purpose too
OCO-2’s mission isn’t to prove climate change, nor to prove the human contribution to greenhouse gases. NASA’s earth scientists have moved on and call those questions a false debate. Scientists are able to accurately measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – the key driver of climate change — both today and in the past, and see our impact.
“Climate change is real. Period. We have all the data to show it’s happening; we don’t have all the data to know how to address it,” said Annmarie Eldering, OCO-2’s Deputy Project Scientist.
OCO-2 will gather that data about where all the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere comes from and how the various natural “sinks” – oceans and forests – absorb and later release carbon back into the atmosphere. Eldering knows more data won’t convince skeptics, but believes the more we understand and can measure, the more informed our actions and policies can be.
When people found out I was going to see a rocket launch, a common question was “NASAs still does that?” With the demise of the shuttle and the US ability to send man into space, the media and public’s attention has wandered.
Seeing a satellite-bearing rocket head into space, meeting the people who made it happen, and knowing the importance of the mission and the consequences of failure — both in launch and in societal acceptance of climate change — made it personal all right. I’ll be cheering OCO-2 on as it makes its way into its orbit and starts collecting and transmitting its crucial data.
Originally published on Because Geeks.
by Diane | Jul 12, 2014 | It's All About Me
It’s not that grocery shopping is so hard, it’s just that you have to keep doing it. Especially when you run out of cat food.
I’d generally avoid the big grocery shop which meant frequently stopping at Safeway on the way home from work, hungry for dinner, unwise choices hankering to be made. That was the best case scenario: worst was grabbing take out on the way home.
Then I met SPUD. I’d heard of it for a while — a grocery delivery company with a focus on local, organic foods and cute little trucks wandering the city. Think Whole Foods on wheels. Problem is I don’t shop Whole Foods, don’t care much about organic, try to care somewhat about local but do care about price, and it didn’t seem like a great fit for me. Plus there was the concept that grocery shopping isn’t that hard. How pathetic would it be to outsource?
But as life piled up, that kind of pathetic beat out the other kinds of pathetic that found me at Safeway making hunger-based choices. Now every Wednesday I come home thrilled to find a blue box of goodness in front of my suite door, sometimes with a bouquet of flowers on top (SPUD loves me too! Oh wait, I order them. Never mind.)
Every week I make considered choices about the week’s menus and fill my online cart with things like chicken breasts, salmon, produce, some prepared meals like Aussie pies and salmon & dill quiches, snacks, yogurt, and that all-important cat food. Sometimes I even eat all the produce.
Though the individual items are sometimes (though not always) more expensive than what I’d pay at Superstore if I ever psyched myself up enough to go there, or even Safeway, the total without the plethora of prepared foods and hasty choices is less than I was paying for food previously.
There are items I won’t get through SPUD. My weakness is cherries. The short growing season gives me such anxiety that I have to buy all the cherries while I can, and they’re expensive enough without the organic delivered premium.
I won’t often pay for the local, grassfed, yogic, college-educated beef and whatnot either, but I’m more a chickenarian anyway.
Another downside is my inability to visualise what, say, a pound of grapes looks like, so that I end up thinking “I spent how much on this handful?!”
But overall, SPUD not only takes away the burden (don’t roll your eyes) of going grocery shopping and curbs some unnecessary spending, it forces me to plan meals ahead. Now I just have to get better about bringing some of those meals to work for lunch.
If you want to try it out, my SPUD code will get you $20 off your first order (and I think I get the same discount). You earn points with orders and it doesn’t take long to accumulate enough to get $10 off.
If it doesn’t sound like it’s for you, enjoy this Stompin’ Tom Connors song:
by Diane | Jun 29, 2014 | Travel
“It is not so much a matter of traveling as of getting away; which of us has not some pain to dull, or some yoke to cast off?”
– George Sand, Winter in Majorca
That’s the epigraph in the book I just started, The Vacationers by Emma Straub, the book I coincidentally started reading on the plane ride to my mini-vacation. It struck me not for its literal truth, but there is truth in there. (I prefer Pico Iyer’s “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.”) The timing of Iceland wasn’t coincidental — a year after my brother died — and this trip, plus Galapagos in the fall, come as I ramp up Operation What’s Next?
What fills my well is travel, and experiences outside my normal world, so on a whim I applied for social media accreditation for the launch of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (what happened to OCO-1? Oops.)
This is what the mission is all about:
I didn’t think about logistics, and didn’t think I had much chance of being accepted, so when I got the word I was one of 50 out of 500 applicants selected I scrambled to make arrangements to get to not-really-close-to-anything Lompoc, California for the Canada Day launch (would I have applied if I’d read carefully enough to realize it was launching at 3am on July 1? Maybe.) A road trip idea fell through and LA is the nearest major airport, at least the nearest with direct flights from Vancouver, and I have friends there and a list of must-sees I haven’t seen in my past trips there. (Most of which I’m likely not to see this time either.)
So after driving from LA to Lompoc today, tomorrow we get treated like media, if most media bothered to cover launches, with access to the mission scientists and engineers and a tour of the base. Then we sleep, briefly, and will watch the launch from a privileged vantage point, and will I come down from the high to sleep again before heading back to LA? Maybe not, but either way I’ll head back there for a day before heading home, dreaming of the memory of rockets’ red glare and the anticipation of giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies, instead of nightmares about needles and death.
I’ve been defensive recently when hit with “must be nice” comments about my travels — Iceland was in the works for 3 years, Russia wasn’t a holiday, and Galapagos has been top of my bucket list for a long time and I finally have the opportunity to go with someone who feels the same. My flippant but true answer to explain the money, time and energy I expend on travel is “I don’t have kids,” and the more complete answer is that travel and interesting experiences are what feed my soul, so I spend my money, time and energy on what feeds my soul. I’m looking forward to the next couple days of feasting.
Oh and you can follow my in-the-moment launch thoughts @deekayw and www.becausegeeks.com.
by Diane | Jun 11, 2014 | It's All About Me
I saw a woman wearing this on a t-shirt today and it made me laugh … and reflect on my relationship with the word “cool.” I’m so uncool I use cool more frequently than any grown woman should to express admiration. If you followed me for a week and wrote down everything I called cool you’d a) be worthy of a restraining order b) wonder what dictionary definition I was using.
One of my early bosses once said he bet I was one of the popular girls in high school. I have no idea why his perception of me was so far off reality other than his cool-dar was way off. I’ve never been one of the popular girls, never wanted to be, never been comfortable with a large percentage of the population. My best friend and I used to sit by our lockers and make snide comments to each other about the “hairspray girls” as they passed by, those heavily made up and follically teased girls who went to the bathroom in packs. They were (theoretically) cool. We were in the segregated International Baccalaureate classes, which made us the poster children for uncool high schoolers. I was so uncool that when a vice principle called us the Bobbsey Twins as we sat by our lockers, I had to point out they were fraternal boy/girl twins so the comparison was off — predating my tendency to point people to Snopes when they spread misinformation. I know that’s uncool — turns out no one really wants to know the truth, Mulder — and usually refrain nowadays.
I’m not part of the cool uncool who love video games, graphic novels and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I don’t follow Wil Wheaton or Felicia Day on Twitter. I don’t lay claim to coolness of any sort, uncool cool or not. But what I have found in very recent years is I’m more comfortable embracing my interests — travel, science, reading, web geeking, animals, cable TV, volunteerism, whatever. And there’s a certain type of person — the kind of person I find cool — who finds that cool.
I’ve known people who maintained the same definition of cool they had in high school – valuing the right music, the right clothes, the right car, the right tastes and things — and to me they are the epitome of uncool (the uncool kind of uncool). I knew someone who created a Meetup group and hosted a murder mystery event so she could meet more people in her new city, and while I’d rather have poked a fork in my eye than attend, I thought the idea was cool: she felt a lack in her life and did something she thought was fun to rectify it.
That is, in the end, how I would write that dictionary definition of cool: people who enjoy things unironically, whole-heartedly, non-judgementally, and without using their specific passions as a secret handshake for entry to their friendship, trust that the people they find cool will find them cool for that.
![Cold War and Peace]()
by Diane | May 31, 2014 | Travel
What might save us, me, and you
Is if the Russians love their children too
— Russians by Sting, 1985
Oh shut up Sting. I know, it was a rhetorical rather than literal “what if,” but even 15 year old me, fearing the prospect of Mutually Assured Destruction, thought it was trite. (To be clear I loved him and still kinda do, though there’s even more I have to ignore now in order to maintain that love.)
I didn’t exactly choose to go to Russia, but I did choose to do a quick trip to Moscow and Saint Petersburg before heading home from the weird bubble that was Sochi in my six-week stint in January and February. That Stingian refrain was my earworm as I battled the cognitive dissonance of the dispairingly ugly news around me and the fascinating beauty in front of me.
Saint Petersburg with its canals and architecture eminded me of Venice, though people who have actually been to Venice are likely to vehemently disagree. It felt European — it is, in fact, European — with reminders of the Russian empire everywhere, while Moscow was decidedly Russian with reminders of the Soviet Union everywhere.
We wandered through the vast Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, founded by Catherine the Great and including the empire’s opulent Winter Palace, and I was struck by the thought: “No wonder the working class revolted.”
Our guide was both proud of the history and culture on display, and proud of the fact that it now belonged to the state for all to enjoy. As she said, during Soviet times the tenor of the tour would have been much different. I wouldn’t have been able to write the first part of that sentence. Well, actually, I wouldn’t have been allowed to be there. Now, there seems an odd mix of shame at what the Soviets destroyed and what they tried to suppress, and nostalgia for some of the lost ideals.
We visited the Summer Palace in the countryside and as we heard more and more tales of each subsequent tsar or emporer erecting grand buildings to mark their legacy, I was struck by the thought: “Sochi was Putin’s Winter and Summer Palace.”
Seven of us walked into Red Square in Moscow and burst into a cacophony of wows, oooohs, and look at thats … all pointed in a different direction. “It’s like Disneyland!” one Brit exclaimed of the colourful spectacle.
The GUM department store still sells Soviet-era baked goods, ice cream (your choice of vanilla or vanilla) and sodas (your choice of carbonated lemonade or carbonated lemonade). Our guide remembers birthdays as a young girl, her entire class wearing the same uniform, bringing the same mushroom-looking pastry for the class on your birthday.
The way we’d have 50s diners they have Soviet diners, selling the same wares at, we were told, the same prices, with cheeky “vintage” signs.
Over the wall peeks the Kremlin, including the palatial yellow building bearing Putin’s office: Disnelyand’s dictator, whose tendency to trample on human rights went largely unnoticed until some of it got Facebook friendly. We were trailed by a special “Kremlin guide” inside the walls, who did no guiding but a lot of peering at us from a distance.
We saw the church where Pussy Riot was arrested — the largest orthodox church which had been literally blown up by Stalin, replaced with a swimming pool, and faithfully ressurected after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without agreeing with the band’s punishment, I wondered how Catholics would have reacted to an anti-Catholic protest in the Vatican, never mind after decades of religion being illegal and a couple of decades of rebuilding the suppressed faith and destroyed buildings. “We can say what we want here,” said our guide, dismissing concerns of censorship. “They went too far.” I neither agree nor disagree, but I note the sentiment, which is widespread.
Later we visited a cold war bunker, now a museum where they show visitors how close we came to mass destruction, and we could sit in the consoles where the launch codes would have been entered, and they showed a film of what the ensuing strikes would have looked like. Another film they showed on the history of the cold war was no more propaganda than anything I saw in school, but from the Russian view: this was a dark period in the world’s history, we hope we’ve learned from it, and without explicit finger-pointing there’s the message that the United States started the nuclear arms race and are the only country to have used a nuclear bomb in war.
At the end of the bunker tour the museum let us have photo opps with some props — Kalashnikov rifles, Soviet army uniforms — but I couldn’t play after the sombre reminder of what could have been.
And then the Crimean peninsula situation was in the news just before I l left the country, and the West was outraged and the Muscovites were scared. In the Soviet era, our guide’s teacher parents had been rewarded with family trips to Sochi for the summer, but after the collapse they, like many Russians, went to the Crimean instead, where they had family and friends, and which used to be part of their homeland.
During the week in the two capitals, we heard stories of a history I’d largely forgotten since grade nine, and literary figures I’ve loved without really understanding where they came from, and I sat in awe in the packed Bolshoi and Mariinsky (aka Kirov) theatres watching ballet and opera. with Russians of every age. It was ironic hearing Westerners talk about the barbarism of Russians while hearing Russians speak passionately of history and culture and philosophical ideas to foreigners who couldn’t reciprocate.
I’ve heard that one of the difficulties the US is facing now as Putin expands his palace is that there are few Russian experts to advise. That career path didn’t seem to have a bright future much after 1991. I can’t pretend to have an understanding of the Russian mind or Putin’s mind, but I know everyone’s the hero of their own story, and Russians do love their children too, and I can only hope there’s enough understanding and wisdom on both sides so the world doesn’t go MAD (as in mutually assured destruction) once again.
