From the Archive: Risky Business

My most memorable experience with Ares II…definitely the RTF campaign. I’m sorry, I’m sure you get that a lot, but I think it’s for good reason. God knows the stakes were high, and I just work at Kennedy—I can just imagine what folks at Marshall or Michoud were feeling. All eyes are on you, you know? We’re launching rockets, it’s risky business, that comes with the job, but return to flight was really a whole different ball game.

After Flight 5, everything we did was under a microscope. This is a silly thought, but it always reminded me of being in the navy—your shoes polished just right, standing up straight to the millimeter, or whatever it is they do. They counted every step—really, I’m not joking, I think they had a few folks wear a FitBit for a while. Trying to see how fatigued we were getting? I mean, just so anal about the weirdest things—sorry for my French.

But it was all an abundance of caution, right? We weren’t taking any chances; they needed Galleon up for EM-5, the whole program had really been leading up to that point. So it’s no surprise we were kind of jumping at shadows. And it’s no surprise the launch campaign drew out the way it did.

What really stuck with me more than anything else from that campaign was when we rolled back for Elsa. That was after wet dress and checkouts at 39B, and it was the closest we’d been to flying up to that point. But it struck me that there wasn’t any kind of disappointment from anybody. Everyone was just so locked in, laser-focused on the job. We had to shelter to keep the vehicle safe, so that’s what we did, and we were all right on the same wavelength. I do think that was the smoothest roll we ever had.

I was working right when we were getting her in the doors. Nothing like a vehicle on the crawler to make you feel really, really tiny. I remember standing there that night, in the doorway of High Bay 2, just listening to the crawler’s engine chugging, the rain pattering outside, the wind making the whole building shudder and groan. The lights from inside threw this huge shadow out into the night, and—I know how this sounds—but it was like a ghost watching over us. Later we said it was the ghost of Flight 5, come down to make sure we did everything just right. And we made damn sure we did.

-Lorinda Thompson, KSC