Finally, after nearly 3 years of rocket development, the time had come to launch a kerbal into space! While we expected there might be some issues during the mission no one was ready for the Monolith to make another attempt at keeping us grounded. After Specialist Bob was loaded up into the rocket and it was raised vertical on the pad, atmospheric pressure began to decline shortly after it was powered up, a sign that storms were forming. This storm was being generated by the Monolith and was last seen to impact rocket flights back in February. Since then a cooling system was installed to prevent the storms and it appeared to work until this flight, which led us to develop a new theory as to why the Monolith was generating the storms in the first place.

The Flight

Rattled from his experience in the capsule during the storm, Bob ceded his spot to his backup Specialist Bill, who boarded the rocket 6 days later after a new cooling unit was installed around the Monolith and a day’s delay due to weather. Pre-launch operations proceeded without issue leading up to the 5 minute GO/NO GO poll, which failed due to upper-atmospheric wind conditions that neared the launch commit limits for flight. After some discussion among the launch team, using our experience with past Ascension missions, the decision was made to proceed with the launch. The countdown resumed and the rocket lifted off the pad with Bill atop it at 15:58:00.20 local time.

Read the rest of this entry »