Tracy Drain

But at any rate, you have the spacecraft folded up.

It's in the nose cone of the rocket.

You launch the rocket and we're all like on the ground with our hearts beating very, very fast.

Absolutely.

I was actually at that time in the mission.

I was the mission manager for like the last year going up to launch.

And so it's a little bit weird because you have this title that sounds really gigantic, but you have no duties in that room.

It's the people who are out there, the flight director.

If something goes wrong, yes, I was definitely going to be in the hot seat.

And also, as you're going up through the countdown to launch, the mission manager has a responsibility to check in with the flight director and everyone and make sure things are going well and give the thumbs up to our project manager who's down at the Cape with another part of the team.

So you're there.

That day is very exciting and horrifying.

But you have your spacecraft in the nose cone, and then it –

launches and it takes some time for it to like get all the way up through the atmosphere enough so that you can open the fairing and expose the spacecraft because you don't want that to happen while you're still going through air it can be damaging to the equipment so once you get up high enough the fairing opens the spacecraft separates and this this is kind of adorable that

in this day and age, you can have cameras inside the fairing.

And so when the fairing opens and there's light in there, you can actually see the spacecraft as it's still attached to the rocket.

And for whatever reason, we were all so busy in that last year, like hilariously sleep deprived.

I did not remember that we were going to have a camera in there.

And so in our mission support area, when the

We were playing the news feed just like everyone else is as well as our headsets on talking to each other and talking to the people down at the Cape.