The Final Countdown

I’ve noticed that most of the posts on our team blog have been about triathlon-related things, like training, racing, and such.  I suppose this makes sense, seeing as how it is a triathlon team.  However, I’m going to depart from that trend and talk about something non triathlon-related.  For the next two weeks, I won’t be able to train with the team.  In fact, I won’t be able to train much at all.   Instead, I’ll be spending 13 hours a day at Mission Control in Houston working on the Space Shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.   In many ways, this will be kind of cool.  The stuff I worked on is going into space, and I’ll get to listen to the astronauts call down to Mission Control while they’re outside of the Shuttle working on the telescope.   Plus, I’ve been working on an IMAX camera that will fly in the Shuttle payload bay and film all the action, so if things work the way they’re supposed to, I should get to see a lot of pretty pictures.  I’m still hoping for an imdb.com page, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to pan out.

On the other hand, watching hardware you worked on go up into space and out of your control is incredibly nerve-wracking. It’s the night before launch, and it actually feels a lot like the night before a race.  I’m sitting in my hotel room wondering, “Did I forget anything?  Am I completely prepared?  Have I done everything I can to make sure this is a success?” Unfortunately, this race lasts 13 days, instead of a couple of hours, and something could go wrong at any time.   I’ll feel a lot better when it’s all over and the Shuttle has safely landed again.