BLASTOFF!!!

Not at 3am this morning.  No, we’re experienced space shot watchers now.  We KNOW the Cape routines. We HAVE the answer to where and when to get to see ORION blastoff. We woke up at 5:30, and arrived at 6:30 on the causeway for the successful launch of ORION at 7:05am. 

Plenty of time to park, relax, and view it all, including the donut-charged up Tiger Cub Pack at rivers edge who were driving their parental units batty by the time ORION flew.

The crowd had gathered as before. The cruise ship upper decks were crowded, and the newscaster from the local radio station was reporting all viewing spots surrounding the Cape once more packed to capacity.

This, the heaviest space craft to ever rise from the Earth was getting major press.

And then...

There was no sound as we saw the ignition light off the three upside down candles of Orion’s three engine first stage. Slowly. Agonizingly slowly she rose from her pad, gathering speed as the miles of distance between us and it were consumed with the growing roar of its millions of pounds of fiery thrust.

And just as we all, especially those sugared up Tiger Scouts, began to cheer to beat all she roared up through the clouds and only the faintest hint of grey smoke against her white gantry building reminded us she had been there at all. 

The roar continued a long while after she was gone as she invisibly hit the sound barrier, and beyond.

And within four hours ORION had splashed down in the Pacific as cleanly as if she’d been doing it for years.  And moments later the headlines read:

There's your new spacecraft, America

Splashdown! Orion Spaceship Aces First Test on Road to Mars

'Nearly flawless': Orion passes 2-orbit test flight

And we came home. Me to the classic MAGNIFICENT SEVEN on DVD, and Mona to three hours of catch-up sleep. But I only watched 30 minutes of the movie and went for a walk on the beach. 

There are nice community parks every quarter mile or so along A1A in Cocoa Beach that have beach access parking and facilities for swimmers. Fisher Park, just south of our church, was easy to walk to and I was able to catch a pic of the Christmas dec/TIKI god out front, and a 1976 US bicentennial monument to the first seven Mercury astronauts.

  

The morning was grey but the clouds kept their moisture, mostly, as I looked for interesting stuff to photo on the beach.  Like these Pipers, and this man-o-war jellyfish.  No. I did not go in today.

When I returned Mona and I shared lunch and walked the couple blocks up past the Ron-Jon store to the DINOSAUR STORE.  This business has been here for 19 years but in an older building across the street till just a couple years ago. 

Loaded with castings and authentic fossils this is called the largest paleologic retail store in the world. The top two floors are becoming a museum that opens this summer.

Intererestingly, Florida has no dinosaur fossils.  Only ice age and after mammals.  When the great lizards ruled the planet the Sunshine State was under water.

Then we hit the library.

At about 3pm the phone rang and it was Coastal RV telling us our new fresh water pump was in so we packed her up and by 4:05 FROG was getting her new hardware. And we would be taking full showers again!

So what do traveling explorers do the day after they’ve seen the biggest space ship ever go into orbit and the world’s biggest dinosaur retailer? They wake up late on Saturday morning and go watch the Cocoa Beach Annual Christmas Parade which starts about a half mile south of their camp site right on A1A. 

Hey, the librarian told us it’s a cute small town parade!  And the library has a float.

-Ken

T minus TOMORROW

Not 4am.  3am.  Do you remember Christmas Eve as a child?  Did you ever have a hard time falling asleep?  I never dreamed of sugarplums.  I couldn’t dream!  That was last night.  And when I heard the busses picking up the VIP groups from the Marriott Courtyard across the street from our church at 3am I gave up trying.

I woke Mona at 3:30.  Well, I would have, but she was already awake,  So we packed some snacks and headed up A1A to the Canaveral Causeway and its north side Banana River pull offs.

4am and the crowd was gathering. Campers, cars, trucks; police lights flashing all around the perimeter of the causeway, river, canal, Canaveral itself .

Only 3 hours to go but we had our spot! We were not going to miss the first space shot of the Orion Deep Space, sometimes called MARS MODULE, space craft. EFT-1. Experimental Flight Test Number One.

We watched live NASA TV on cell phones. We watched the sky gradually lighten over the Cape and strained our eyes to see the brightly lit up but miles away launchpad 37 where the earth’s largest space vehicle was blowing nitrogen dioxide into the air from its vents.

T minus 30 minutes and… holding!  Some darn tourist in a boat was too close to the base!  7:05, the beginning of the almost 3 hour launch window and there’s a loan boater holding up the show! “It happens”, says our neighbor who lives right at the end of the causeway in Port Canaveral.

7:30 comes and goes.  The boater is moved out but now ground winds are too strong.  I try to imagine what kind of winds NASA is afraid of for their millions of pounds of space ship and NASA TV says ’20 miles an hour’.  Hey, they’re the engineers.

8am.  No one has left so far as we know.  Some have even been added to the throngs lining every parking lot and pull off they can see from for miles around.  The VIPs who left our next door hotel at 3am are either in the lounge on the 7^th floor of the Exploration Center enjoying breakfast leavings, or up at the Visitor Center where the neighbor beside us knows her husband is giving out NASA info on request.

9am. The wind had died down but now a fuel valve is stuck. An old memory is jogged and I think I can hear Walter Cronkite speaking on our table model 15” diagonal 1960’s black and white TV, though he’s somewhere at an outside desk near where we are waiting, telling us, ‘We are being told a fuel valve is sticking and the hold is continuing on Mercury, Gemini, Apollo number….” Ah, the good old days are back.

9:45am and the launch window closes.  No launch today. The Brevard County Police know what to do.  They keep traffic moving slowly but surely and the crowds are sent home, or to school or work in good, commendable order.

We headed across the causeway to Cocoa on the mainland to get our new Shur-Flo fresh water pump ordered. The old one is pumping pretty well but it seems the impeller is broken inside from all the noise it is making.  $300.00 tomorrow afternoon, installed. Ka-ching for Coastline RV!

So repair it, why don’t cha!  Right.  There are few repairs on RV components like this pump.  It’s the nature of our replace, don't repair, economy.

Back to the coach and we fall, literally, into bed. We sleep till early afternoon.  Then, between light rain squalls, we take a walk to the nearby Indian River shoreline, and I leave Mona to read a while as I walk down the street to the flagship RON-JON SURF SHOP (super store, really).

Part museum it is the Cabella’s of American surfing.. Or Cabella’s is the Ron-Jon of American outdoorsing.  RJ was founded in 1961 in New Jersey.

And I’ll bet you thought Hawaii was the world center of the surfing crowd! 

The ORION launch is reset for 7am tomorrow morning and we are still at First UMC in Cocoa Beach, one block from the ocean.  We aren’t going quite so early tomorrow though.  We’re old hands at this now.  We’ll show up at 6.

-Ken

T minus about 9 hours or so

Today Coastal RV found FROG lost two of her eight house batteries. They had lived a full life but we decided to keep them for now, just disconnect them.  In the future all eight will need replaced at the same time.

They are being filled with distilled water when we fill all the batteries with our pump system so they will not go dry, but we are living on only the remaining six now. Why? Maybe they will be enough for awhile. And before installation each of the eight costs $150.00

Paul, owner of Coastal RV here in Cocoa, Florida, found areas to seal on roof and sides that were letting in the small amounts of water we had problems with two weeks ago.  He feels, and we pray, the problem is solved.  But we did have 9” of rain in 24 hours. Such a storm can find entrances never seen before.  And it did.

A new solenoid on the rear slide has it tight as a drum as well.  And the issue with the house batteries draining the starter batteries has been resolved at Paul’s suggestion easily.  When we dry camp we simply use the full electric shut off switch for the chassis.  Then there is no way the engine-starter batteries can drain.  TY Paul!

While FROG was getting repaired we drove to libraries in Melbourne and Palm Bay, Florida.  It was a beautiful day of sun and 77 but instead of a beach, we wanted to be close in case Paul would call with an issue we had to go back for.

The libraries AND a museum satisfied both of us.  The Museum of the Honor America Society in Melbourne I mean.

In the seventies Bob Hope was so saddened by the way troops coming home from Vietnam were being treated by the public that he started what for a time became a nationwide patriotic movement called HONOR AMERICA.

Today the last chapter of the society operates this museum and veterans park in Melbourne, Florida.  It’s a combination patriotic display and community wide history museum. And its FREE!

Another free experience we found today was at the Turkey Creek Wildlife Refuge.  This is a local set of woods and wetland hiking trails and boardwalks that took us back to the really OLD Florida.  

It would almost not have surprised us if a band of Seminole warriors would have passed us on the trail.  But we only saw squirrels, a woodpecker, a Slink (3” lizard) and some turtles, one of which seemed to be stuck atop a stick!

But at one of the libraries we did see some interesting geese and an Osprey. Such a proud, big bird.  Kin to the bald eagle but found only in seaside wetlands.

We returned to pick up the coach, then took it to a campground to dump and fill tanks. We had to move from North Merritt UMC to First UMC of Cocoa Beach.  NOT because we are now parked one block from the ocean. NOT because we are closer than ever to tomorrows dawn launch of the Orion. 

But because the very lovely site we enjoyed for several nights at North Merritt UMC would have required us to drive through those very low live oak branches twice more.  So we had to choose FROG safety over the peace of a truly quiet and lovely camp site.

TY Pastor Joel and all at North Merritt for your hospitality!!

  

TY Pastor Melissa and Administrator Phyllis at First UMC for yours now.

So we arrived just at dusk on rte A1A in downtown Cocoa Beach, just a couple of blocks from the first RON-JON Surf Shop (think Cabella’s for surfers). We leveled the coach and put out the slides and turned on the water pump.  And the grinding noise from the pump could be heard up in the coach itself.  Yes.  We have a new maintenance issue.

I called and left a message for Paul at Coastal RV, and sent him pics of the pump so he can tell us what to do, but I can only imagine tonight we’ll have to return and replace the pump.  He’s only 15 miles west of us on the Cape Canaveral Causeway.  But we had really hoped we would get some peace from these continuing repairs for a while.

Our maintenance budget was to last for a year and we have maxed it out in six months.

Well, we’re up at 4am to head out to a causeway beach for the launch.  Tourists have filled the campgrounds and hotels here and traffic is heavy.  We expect a zoo tomorrow for miles around.  Prayers will NOT be unappreciated for joy in the experience of seeing and feeling the launch of the heaviest space vehicle ever, and safety in the crowds of tourists, and a simple and inexpensive fix (miracle?) for our pump.

More pics on FACEBOOK

-Ken