Today (er, tonight) is my 6th day of working a GEO satellite launch, and it would have been my 11th straight day of work if I hadn’t taken last Friday off. It’s nice to be getting more comfortable with the procedures, and it’s been fun to get to chat with people in my group and get to know them better while we’re on console. But there are long (LOOOOOONG) stretches where it’s very boring. I have what Becca’s dubbed the rock star shift, 2:30 - 10:30 pm, and it’s usually busy in the afternoon with some sort of procedure, usually an Earth update. The afternoon then relaxes into evening, the emails slow down, we order greasy food for dinner, I try to resist the allure of peanut M&M’s in the back room, and the hours c r a w l . I mark time by the recording our spacecraft’s momentum error in a spreadsheet, once per hour, and examining how Excel has updated the best-fit line. Oh, the excitement!

Overall though, it’s been a neat experience. And I’m lucky to have gotten a relatively easy shift, time-wise. I’m naturally a night owl, but the 4th shift (9:30pm - 5:30am) would have been a serious stretch, and I would have felt like death warmed over if I had to come in for the first shift every day (2:30am - 10:30am). I still get nervous talking over the voice net, but that’s really pretty dumb because there are only a handful of us in the room at a time.


Josh and I finally bought tickets to go to Zion National Park over Labor Day weekend. Yay! True to form, I’m much more excited about the trip now that I’ve scrolled through pictures online. We still have a list of stuff to buy for the trip (namely, a tent and a sleeping bag for me), and I’m brainstorming ways to dehydrate myself during the days so that I don’t have to venture to the bathroom in the middle of the night with spiders, snakes, or anything that flies (hmm, maybe I’ll add a headlamp to my shopping list). But daytime activities? Definitely looking forward to those!