The moment of 2008 when victory turned to torture for SpaceX

By the time of Flight Three, the Space Pacers had become accustomed to their visits to the Central Pacific KwaZulu-Natal atoll. Over the course of three years, they learned how to survive in a tropical environment and enjoy island life. However, some of these lessons won hard.

Early in the course of the KwaZulu-Natal experience, engineer Brian Biejeld sailed from KwaZulu-Natal in the evening. It happened. He and a few others slept under the stars, having a very pleasant night. But the next morning, Belde lacked a change of clothes. So he grabbed a T-shirt from a package of Falcon 1 swag items that was shown at Omelek. Filled with a vacuum, the white T-shirt may have been wrinkled, but at least it was clean, and he kept the sun away from his back. Bjelde went through huge amounts of sunscreen every day – covering any part of the skin in the tropical sun. During that day, as he unfolded himself in it, Bejeld noticed that the t-shirt’s wrinkles had straightened out under the heat and humidity of the island.

Late in the afternoon he went to take a shower. “I took off my shirt, and the worst sunburn of my life was caused by the T-shirt.” “I had a complete sunburn. I think the end of my days will be going through skin cancer, it’s because of the Quajaline experience. He got direct sunlight from a cheap white T-shirt. I didn’t think to put sunscreen under it. how are you? ”

The people on Omelek punished the heat and humidity in a different way. Biegeld was a child of California, where he was often hot but barely damp. And he had never done this kind of physical labor before.

Marine travelers at sea may be familiar with crotch rot, but Bijelde had never heard of it. “I don’t claim to be thin or skinny, and if your thigh rubs a little, and then you sweat, it leads to spraying.” “But the sweet, humid atmosphere has made things worse.”

As he struggled to get around one day as he walked with a bow toward the island, Beld asked the more experienced Chris Thompson what he should do about his painful illness. Did he need penicillin, maybe? Thompson, a former Marine, explains the trick to rubbing the underarm deodorant between the legs. And gave another useful suggestion to Thompson: switching from berserks to boxers briefs.

Some of the women on the island faced their own journey. In the early years, Chin’s Chiniri and Flow Lee had little privacy and no running water. Using the island toilet it is necessary to fill the bucket before seawater so that the toilet can be flushed. The rains were even more noble. Initially, SpaceXers filled the trash with water to wash their hands. When it was really hot and sweaty at the end of a long day. Lee said he would claim a bath and wash the rainwater off his head.

As the Flight One campaign progressed in 2006, the small team moved from the trash to Camp Shower. They collected rainwater in large black bags and then placed the bags on the helipad to warm up during the day. One of these bags will be pulled over the stand so that it hangs on a folding metal chair, making a hot shower a luxury. For the benefit of Chinny and Lee, there was a bit of secrecy in the shower curtain.

Fun in the sun

Engineers and technicians worked hard during the day, but crews often took breaks as the sun approached the horizon. They float; Few people have even sunk to the bottom as a final protection from the heat.

Sometimes their attempts at obscure entertainment go awry. The Omelek was small enough to walk in a few minutes, but was an old, shabby golf cart for employee use during the next flight campaign. Zach Dunn described it as a “serious tood” with hanging billing wire and bubblegum. At some point between flights two and three, the brakes in the car went bad, but no one realized it when the launch engine returned from Los Lathi to Los Angeles.

At the end of a work day, when some of his friends pulled the boat back to the quagmire, Dunn decided to look at them in style. He leaned forward in the car, parked next to the trailers overnight and put the pedals on the metal. Dunn thought it would be fun to zoom in, respect and wave to his outgoing friends. He made a pretty good move as he approached the dock, and in preparation for saluting the boat, Dunn decided it was better to slow down. In a slapstick moment straight out of a cartoon, when Dunn pushed the brake pedal he went down to the floor without any resistance. He managed to attract the attention of his peers, but for the wrong reasons, as he began to scream and pay attention to the small stone shore. From there, Dunn faced a clear shot in the lagoon, probably flipping from the end as he left. He made a split-second decision and turned to the palm tree instead.

“Instead of hitting and respecting me and being a normal goofball, they just saw me running at full speed, not explaining anything,” Dunn said of the group on the boat. “Then I crashed into a palm tree at top speed.”

The impact cart threw Dunn on the steering wheel, but he walked away from the accident. The crew aboard the boat was woken up.

Some of the SpaceXers who stayed overnight fished to the coral reefs around Omelek, although they left whatever they caught. Small organisms that grow on tropical coral reefs produce siguatoxins, which are more concentrated in small fish and in large fish above the food chain. Marshallese people developed immunity to toxins, but it causes severe food poisoning in outsiders. Now and then the SpaceXers will hear the report of the death of a visitor to the quack after eating reef fish.

There were also natural hazards on the ground. Coconut crabs, which can grow up to three feet in length and are the largest arthropods in the world, lived on Omelec. Sometimes, they would scratch on a tree and see a strong prince using a coconut to knock him to the ground. Then, back to the ground, the crab will open the coconut. “We didn’t sleep well on the beach,” said Jeff Ritchie, a structural engineer.

By the time of Flight Three, Omelek engineers and technicians continued to improve their environment, especially with better diets for those sleeping on the island. In the double-spaced kitchen, they took turns cooking meals that increased the rent at the Army Cafeteria on the quay. In the morning, they served boiled plates of scrambled eggs. In the evening, they mixed it up. Bulent Altan and the new projection engineer, Ricky Lime, did a lot of cooking because they enjoyed it. It could be roasted steaks one night or shrimp in the prika sauce the next day. Alton’s specialty was a Turkish goulash that he loved to bake, mixing pasta with garlic and yogurt, smoothing in butter-and-tomato sauce. It proved a crowd happy on Omelek. There was also other comfort. There was an endless supply of drinks, including beer, in the evening in the refrigerated sea van.

“Everything was fantastic luxury compared to the first flight, so we chose it on the Omelek,” Alt said. “Really, after really crazy days everyone gathered around at dinner time and was able to sit back and enjoy the rest. We always watch the same movies over and over again, like Starship Troopers. Most importantly, the camaraderie was great. “

Overnight people also built wooden decks attached to the trailer. From there, they will be able to survey some of the darkest skies on Earth. Mostly, clouds obscure their vision. But when it became clear, there were a million bright stars. Sometimes there were also artificial stars. They looked like shooting stars but did not become inactive. Instead, they became brighter – as these international ballistic missiles were fired from the mainland United States to the KwaZulu-Natal Atoll.

It was very ironic: spaceX was supposed to fly fast from Ndemberg to KwaZulu-Natal, and after getting there the crew saw a magnificent view of the missiles launched from Vandenberg. For the better part of half a century, for the development of small Atoll intercontinental ballistic missiles and later, President Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative.” Served as the ground zero for the development of. The military facilities at KwaZulu-Natal still serve many purposes, but the most enduring one is serving as a wide range of targets.

When the Air Force wants to test the accuracy of the Minutman III missile, it will launch a three-stage solid fuel rocket from Vandenberg to KwaZulu-Natal. With its state-of-the-art radar, cameras and other tracking equipment, Quaz’s Reagan test site receives accurate radar and optics data about the missile as it orbits the atmosphere at about four miles per second. Most likely, the missiles targeted Ilegigni Island on the west side of the atoll. This meant that they passed directly over Omelek on the eastern shore of the chain of islands. From there, with the arrival of these missiles, SpaceXers were amazed to spend the night on Omelek. Near Quazlin, the third phase of the missile will go down, leaving only the missile bus, which will carry simulated warheads.

For most of the people above the quagmire, the prospect of incoming ballistic missiles rekindled distant memories of the Cold War. It was beautiful to see those rockets coming in but also a little scary, knowing that death would be imminent if a true military was on board. “The simulated bomb will explode like a little firefly,” Chineri said. “It simply came to our notice then. It reminded me of growing up and fearing nuclear destruction. ”

Another advantage of spending the night in a double-wide trailer is that you can skip the morning rush hours and catch a little more agility. The big Kataraman is credible, taking the Bowang crew from Kwaj to Mac Island and then leaving the SpaceX crew at Omelek. But he got off to an early start, leaving the dock at: 05:05 a.m. This meant that the Buza team had to rise early if they wanted to have breakfast before heading to the pier around Quaz to catch the Rise.

“I never lost that boat,” Buza said. “But sometimes, there would be a fellow player. The Army is very punctual and will not be distracted. Except for one time, they came back to the lap for Elon again. ”