Tracy Drain

You see the light in there and the camera on the spacecraft.

It's so like your last view of your baby as it's going to be leaving the Earth.

And then it gently separates and you can see it start to spin up because it needs to do that to not get too hot from the sun on one side.

So we're in our little barbecue role now.

as it's on its merry little way out into space.

And then it has to, it has pre-programmed routine on board to know that once it gets to a certain rotation rate and it gets stabilized and then it slows down and then it sends out the solar arrays very slowly.

And now you can't see it anymore because the camera is just on the launch vehicle and that is coming back to Earth.

And so we are just watching all of our telemetry in order to see indications that there's sun on the arrays and you're getting the right amount of currents that you're supposed to see and all of those things.

Mm-hmm.

Oh, you're feeling all the feels.

Yeah.

Definitely all the things.

I think especially because even the launches that look on the outside picture perfect, there's always something that's going on behind the scenes that is a little bit nerve wracking.

And so you're definitely full of joy that you got off the ground in the first place.

One of the things that was, this is going to be a slightly longer answer, that was particularly crazy about launching Europa Clipper is that there was a hurricane that went right over the Cape.

You couldn't have aimed it any better on the day we were supposed to launch.

We were supposed to launch on October 10th.

Hurricane Milton, direct hit over Cape Canaveral.

We still had the spacecraft inside of the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Luckily, now that we have weather forecasting, we knew the hurricane was coming, so we didn't roll out.