Launch is incredible. It's a once in a lifetime moment that is the culmination of everything you've worked for in the past two years. It's a now-or-never, has-to-go-right event with super high stakes. Everything has to function as intended, and everyone has to perfectly do what they have been training to do over the past few months. It's crazy stressful and super amazing.
I've experienced three launches; one as a supporting graduate student, and two as the primary payload controller. For the first launch, I got to stand outside the bunker with the photographers, who assured me that "Sometimes the wind carries the second stage back to the bunker. If it does so, though, you don't have to worry because there's absolutely nothing you can do, you'll just die instantly. So don't sweat it." Great. Somehow I survived, and being just a few hundred feet away from a launch is something I will carry with me until the day I do die.
For the second and third launch, I was the lead graduate student, and it was my rocket going up. This means that during flight, I controlled the science experiment from the command-uplink center at the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), about a mile away from the launch site. I'll describe how it went below.
You prepare for launch with a set of three countdowns, which simulate every aspect of the launch, including all scheduled events, responsibilities, and commands transmitted or sent. The third countdown proceeds exactly like the previous two, it's just the real thing-- at 0, the rocket launches. You've gone through the countdown enough times in the previous month and past few hours that everything seems routine, almost boring. The idea is to drill it into you so extensively that it feels normal, and you almost instinctively perform your role during the real thing.
As the countdown progresses, each team is responsible for certain events-- verifying star tracker turn on, checking for good radio lock on the payload, transitioning power to internal on the payload, etc. As each numbered event occurs, the person responsible will check in over radio, and everyone follows along through the count.
Eventually, the final seconds are reached. Since I had no responsibilities until about forty seconds after launch, I went outside the VAB to watch.
It's a pretty incredible event-- I used to think of rocket launches based on videos I'd seen of the space shuttle, crawling slowly up to space. But the space shuttle carries humans-- sounding rockets don't. This allows for a lot more acceleration, as high as 11 g's. Sounding rockets basically disappear once they launch-- they are out of sight within a second or two.
Launch was beautiful. Outside the VAB there's a crowd of people watching; family members, range personnel, etc, standing in a line facing the launch site. It's dark out, and you can't see anyone's faces. From a big speaker nearby, the countdown blares out, and there's a palpable tension in the air. .... Ten.... nine..... eight.... seven....
At zero, something incredible happens. Two miles away, there's what looks like a massive explosion, and you see a bright light speed away upwards, much more rapidly than you expected. Like a mushroom cloud, the gases from launch expand outward along the ground in an instant, glowing and lit up by the rocket as it lifts off. It's clearly a momentous event. Something crazy happened. The desert is fully lit up, and everyone's faces are glowing like around a campfire, and they're all looking out towards the same thing.
... But everything is silent. Being a mile away, the sound hasn't reached you yet. There's about five seconds of otherworldy silence as you watch this incredibly energetic event, a rocket speeding upwards, throttling off to space at Mach 11, in total calm. Then the sound wave rolls over you, and the whole desert is filled the rumble of the loud shockwave.
A few more seconds of breathing it all in, a once in a lifetime event, a crazy, magical moment, that's been started and can never be undone, and then I have to run inside.
At the console, I was responsible for aiming the payload in flight-- acquiring our target star, and placing it on each of our slits to get our science spectra. You go over to the console, get positioned, and then you wait. And hope, and pray. You're on the edge of your seat, full adrenaline, because you know that the past year has been leading to this, and there's only one shot at it. Everything has to go well, and you have to do everything you need to perfectly, without hesitation or mistakes.
I had a very different experience in each of my two launches. On my second launch, I waited at the console. After about 40 seconds, our star appeared, and I immediately moved it to our small, high resolution slit. After about ten seconds, Dr. Green told me we had a good spectrum built up, and to move to the large slit. I did so, and we saw a low-resolution spectrum start to build. As soon as we saw the good spectrum coming in, it was hands-off. I stood at the console for five minutes as our science spectrum built up, and was merely on standby. We could maybe have tweaked the positioning a bit, or peaked up the count-rate, but why would we? If it's working, we have everything to lose and not much to gain. So we just stood there for five minutes, ecstatic, watching our spectrum grow and grow. After the five minutes, the shutter door closed, the HV turned off, and there was an immense weight off my shoulders-- everything had gone right!! It was unbelievable, an amazing feeling, and just happiness all around. Light!
My first launch was very different. I got back to the console, and after about forty seconds, nothing happened. No star appeared, and we began to have the sinking feeling that something wasn't right. We saw no star in any of our cameras, and after ascertaining that the 'target' was locked-- that the rocket wasn't moving anymore, we had to try whatever we could to figure out what was happening, why, and how to fix it. Every single second that passed was an irretrievable moment that we weren't getting a science spectrum, and a slipping away of the two years of work we had put into the launch. I went into the pre-determined scenario that I'd trained for-- no star means a spiral search around the target, with others on the team looking at the star tracker or seeing if we got any counts. I slewed the rocket a little north, then east, then south, then south, west, north, north... nothing. I continued slewing and calling it out until shutter door closed, with no data. It turns out the rocket had suffered a gyroscope glitch, and had pointed 52 degrees off target. My slews were moving us a few arcseconds. We didn't have a chance. We got no flight data, and had to wait over a year for the next launch, due to no fault of our own. It sucked.
Sometimes that's how it goes. Rockets are risky, and high-tech, and push the boundary, and they don't always work. It's part of the game you play to push forward technology and developments in astronomy, and you have to be ready to accept that. I was of course bummed out, but none of it was a waste. Even with no science data, the entire process, --the struggle and challenges of the past two years, all of the operations, the late nights, the problems and solutions-- it was still absolutely worth it, and part of a beautiful, exciting adventure. I would repeat it exactly the same, if I could, failures and all.