Boy, I Hope Orion Launches Tonight

‘Cause I’m an old phart who needs his beauty sleep. Badly!

I find that getting up early, spending a FANTASTIC day at JPL, then writing about it until 22:30, Tweeting until after midnight, then getting up at 01:30 to watch a 04:05 launch that actually didn’t happen and didn’t get scrubbed until 06:34, and then looking forward to doing it all again tonight leaves me a bit muzzy, twitchy, foggy, and not capable of handling heavy machinery, by which I mean an iPhone or a television remote control. (It apparently also makes me completely unable to avoid incredibly long, run-on sentences.) I also haven’t had a drop of caffeine in about a month, which may or may not be actually a good thing for me, but it doesn’t help the whole “staying awake while walking” thing.

So, if you’re up to it (Sleep is for the weak and the sickly!), you can get up at 6:00 am ET (3:00 am PT) for another try at a 7:05 am ET (4:05 am PT) launch tonight/tomorrow morning. If you don’t have NASA-TV on your cable or satellite service, you can watch online at either NASA-TV or Ustream. You can even watch on your phone or tablet or phablet with free apps for either iOS or Android. And if you don’t have a computer of smart phone, how are you reading this? Huh? Gotcha, smart guy!

See? Punchy. Not even good, funny punchy. 5th grade humor style punchy. Maybe 4th grade.

Anyhow, once they get Orion off the ground, assuming the test goes well, they’ll be splashing down in the Pacific off of Baja about 4:24 later, give or take a couple.

Meanwhile, a pretty thing:

While walking Jessie & checking out our (partial) Christmas light display, I saw that the 12 1/2 day old moon (98% full) was rising over all of the clouds from the big storm we’ve have for three days. The clouds have all moved off toward Arizona and above us it was clear as a bell.

Let’s get Orion (and SpaceX and Boeing and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic) working so that I can go stand on the moon and take the reverse picture some time!