The Range Head

The weather was absolutely perfect and the small production crew (the producer, director, a sound guy, a script guy, a gaffer and the actress) was friendly and professional. The weird part is that a couple of days before the taping they sent me a copy of the script to review. When I read it I saw with some degree of anxiety that they'd given me a speaking part! It wasn't much, just five or six lines in two scenes, but that was enough to get me all nervous. I mean, it's one thing to get on the PA at a launch and talk to a couple of hundred fellow crazies, but this is national TV! I don't even like to look at myself on home videos.

Everything went smoothly and I don't think I embarrassed myself too badly. When the show is aired (sometime next Spring, they'll let us know the actual d ate) I'll probably watch it, but when it gets to my part, I'll probably roll my eyes to the ceiling, stick my fingers in my ears and hum loudly...

While we're on the subject, I want to acknowledge a few people from that launch. First is Tom Hail who was out there at 2:30 to pull out the equipment trailer and help me set up early for the boy/cub scouts from Castro Valley. He stayed the entire time and was the very last one to leave (well, along with me) after we tucked the trailer in for the night. Jim "Ripple Fire" Horner gets the award for the most rapid-fire LCO we've ever had. It sounded like a tobacco auction there for a while! This went a long way towards relieving the long backup just prior to sunset.

Tony Cooper gets the "lateral thinking" award for reducing line size. I flew my LOC Onyx just after sunset (my first flight at a regular club launch all year!) and wound up pranging it in the field across the street. When I left to retrieve the pieces, the line was still pretty long. When I returned a couple of minutes later, it was completely gone! "What happened to the line?" I asked. "I told them it was too dark to fly non-night equipped rockets now and dismissed them." Tony said. Well, even though the sun was down, it wasn't *that* dark yet and I said they could have flown a little longer. At that point Tony noticed he still had his sunglasses on! He got on the PA and apologized to everyone for sending them off early, but at least he was erring on the side of caution, seeing as how last year we tried to fly too late and wound up pranging a couple into the crowd who couldn't see the incoming.

Tom Hail comments "I think Tony should have gotten the 'Its Too Dark to Hear!' award also. My daughter has forgiven him, though. She was second in line when he made the call."

We didn't quite break 200, but 197 flights are nothing to sneeze at. Just think if Tony hadn't sent those people away!

I watched the launch on TV with a mixture of excitement not felt in decades, and wistfulness at seeing all of the other surviving Mercury astronauts on camera again: Carpenter on NBC, Cooper on CBS and Schirra on ABC. ABC also had Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to have walked on the moon.

Two notable quotes came out of the usually banal "color" commentary. When asked about the dangers of the early space program, Wally Schirra said "Well, the four of us left [of the original Mercury 7] are all the Atlas pilots." While that didn't exactly answer the question, it's an interesting observation. Alan Shepard (who died just last July of cancer) and Gus Grissom (who was killed in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967) both flew Redstones. Deke Slayton (who died of a brain tumor in 1993) never flew in Mercury due to a heart condition, but flew on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.

When asked if he'd want to go back into space, Gene Cernan answered with a diplomatic "been there, done that" sort of response. But after the launch, he broke into the commentary with "I've changed my mind! I want to go!"

And finally, after the countdown was stopped twice in the last hour for two planned holds, it got stopped twice more; once at T-9 minutes for a cabin pressure sensor, and again at T-5 for an airplane in the area. Airplane in the area? Wow, just like one of our launches! Even NASA has to wait for pilots who can't read the damn NOTAM's!