Next week will be a major milestone. Although the flight of the concept launcher is a very important test for the capsule team, something else excites me even more (and if you know me, you know that launching rockets makes me happy). Next week we will announce our project to the rest of world. We will tell them that we are aiming to reach that final boundary,and that we as students, are on our way to space.

At this moment an average of 10 people per day visit this site. Maybe 40 people in total will read a blog item. Next week this will change. At this moment the team is congressing to this point in time called launchday. For the capsule team this means finalizing the rocket for me it means a lot of phonecalls…

For example today the following had to be decided: (read I call somebody, or somebody calls me..)

11:00 Will the tower deflection sensor be available on time? I need the data for my Msc thesis research, and I want to graduate one day…

15:00 How will the press release look like?  What do we communicate as our main reason to do this project? (there are many, but at the end we do it to get hands-on experience, to become better engineers)

20:00 If press will visited our launchday, are the right persons informed? How will cope with interviews? where should journalist go?

22:00 Ehhrrr Frank, we are testing the capsule rocket and we are not really sure if system X works. Should we use the original solution or will we use the backup plan. (okay guys, lets redo the math, fix things with ducktape which are loose and need to be tighted together and use silicon spray to make things loose which are too tight….)

00:00 Writing this blog.

This how a day near a launchday looks for me and most team members have similar stories, about preparing rocket motors, assembling parachutes and fixing electronics. All those people, working together as one team for those 2 minutes of flight.  In seven days we will tell the world our stories and I am looking forward to it!