T-5 days

Yesterday was our first day on our project and it was quite stressful, to say the least. Pretty much an emotional roller coaster all day long:

When we and all our equipment arrived at the Ellington Airfield (where the hanger we work out of is located) the orientation was intense - don't leave stuff on your table, don't take pictures of the coast guard building (they have guns, which means they win, apparently), don't get in the mechanics way, etc. Oh, and be on time. Always on time, or else you probably won't fly....

Anyways, we got through that and began to set out our test equipment. Unfortunately, they still had not accepted our structural analysis, as the person we had write it up for us did not calculate the correct loads. Supposedly there was a document that said what calcs we needed, but my team never saw it, else we would have followed it to a T! They seemed pretty skeptical that we didn't have the document, but our mentor backed us up and eventually they accepted the fact. They did, however, require some sort of structural test, so we had to load our metal cage for the microwave on the old C-9 airplane and they pulled a 9g load on one bar, with only three of the four corners srewed in. The bolt holes were our fault, one did not quite fit, but we were so nervous that the welds might not hold on the metal structure!

They did however and our whole team let out a collective sigh of relief. Our whole morning had been dominated by problems and the overhanging stress of this structural test. If it did not pass the test (if it broke or bent badly) then we were not going to fly. We also had a boatload of other issues that we didn't see until the whole team was there and we had our mentor's experienced eyes to look over everything. Apparently, everything moves in microgravity - more so than we originally thought. So the morning was also spent thinking like engineers do, trying to come with solutions on the fly. Exhausting to say the least, especially when we had to skip lunch to go to the hardware store.

PS - the C9 we tested on was the 'Weightless Wonder VI', which is the plane that Tom Hanks filmed scenes from Apollo 13 in! Granted, this probably means more to you than to me, as I have yet to see that movie...

Finally, after getting our housing structurally okayed, we were able to begin the process of putting the whole system together and wrapping the whole thing in foam and duct tape to keep the sharp edges from injuring anyone during flight. The result:

This is me looking through the bottom supports:

This is our worktable:

This is our sweet electronics set up that Hannah built to control our microwave:

And then we came home exhausted and got ready to go in the hypobaric chamber...I am kind of nervous for the event!