Frikkin’ Fantastic!

This pretty much speaks for itself, but I wanted to put it here because it absolutely made my day.  I was watch­ing NASA-TV with many oth­ers, hold­ing my breath and hop­ing that the flight test of Ares 1-X would hap­pen today.  In case you missed it, or just want to bask in the glory of it, here:

The flight test took a lot of wait­ing on the weather to get going. It was con­fus­ing. NASA posted this expla­na­tion on their Test Flight Blog yesterday:

The skies look clear except for some high clouds, there’s no rain in the imme­di­ate fore­cast, so why might a rocket not launch? The answer is some­thing called tri­bo­elec­tri­fi­ca­tion. While this isn’t a word you encounter every day, you might expe­ri­ence it if you walk across a dry car­pet or brush up against a cat and then touch a metal sur­face: it’s static.

In the case of Ares I-X, fly­ing through high-level clouds can gen­er­ate “P-static” (P for pre­cip­i­ta­tion), which can cre­ate a corona of sta­tic around the rocket that inter­feres with radio sig­nals sent by or to the rocket. This would cre­ate prob­lems when the rocket tries to trans­mit data down to the ground or if the Range Safety Offi­cer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Sta­tion needed to send a sig­nal to the flight ter­mi­na­tion sys­tem. Until the 45th Space Wing and observer air­craft indi­cate that the skies are clear, Ares I-X will wait them out.

And they did wait, and wait, and it felt so nervewrack­ing to hear the frus­tra­tion in people’s voices as they dis­cussed yet another delay, or win­dows of oppor­tu­nity for launch.  But the end of the video, you can hear that it all worked out. “Let’s think about what we just did.  Our first flight flight test, and the only thing we were wait­ing on, was weather.”  It cuts off the next sen­tence, but I heard it, “That’s frikkin’ fantastic!”