Twenty years ago Wednesday morning, I sat on a hilltop overlooking the northern part of the firing range at Vandenburg Air Force Base. In a pre-internet era for monitoring the umbilical data from what was going to be the first of three climate-research satellites, my go/no duties were completed around 6 a.m. It was just in time to head out of the “blockhouse” (no they don’t really exist anymore) to watch sunrise wash over the SLC-3 launch pad.

Despite this area technically being southern California, it was breezy and bitterly cold. I silently prayed that we would not get scrubbed for the third time in this six-day campaign window. Two days prior, it was from some idiot flying his ultralight around the pattern at Lompoc airport, which is in a temporary air-restricted zone during launch periods. This forced a stand-down after our 30-minute launch window closed.

A Clueless Bozo.

I was fairly anxious given that this was the culmination of ten years of my professional labors. Also, it was my first time being a lead subsystem engineer for the design and development of a cutting-edge and technically challenging suite of instruments. I had just turned 30 when I landed what was considered a really plum assignment. Given the scale and visibility of this program for NASA, I am amazed in hindsight that my branch and division management gave me the responsibility. At times, I was not so sure they should have.

I supported this program from the initial scoping and awarding of the mission to NASA. I knew that while we understood what science products were required, the technology for making those measurements in terms of accuracy, knowledge, consistency, and calibration was extremely daunting. This resulted in many long days and extended trips away from home working with our contractors as we mutually determined how to make those instruments meet their specifications.

The window for launch closed that morning at two minutes before 11 a.m., and my last message from the other members of the launch team (yes, there were cell phones then and, no, not the size of a brick) was that upper atmosphere wind shear was slightly exceeding the acceptable range. My fingers were crossed because if we missed this shot, we had to stand down until after Christmas. Another higher-priority mission (i.e., a Black mission) was going to hog the range resources until “some time” mid-January. I thought it was cold enough now and would need a heavier jacket if I had to come back to repeat this dance.

By my watch, the window had closed, but just as I started to walk to the parking area where my car was, I saw the punctuated glow of ignition. Most folks are used to seeing that slow and ponderous climb of a shuttle launch. (I have memories of the even more laborious climb from the Apollo launches I witnessed as a youth.) This was an Atlas launch, a vehicle developed in the era of competition with the Soviets. It was designed to send “heavy stuff” just half a world away. Now, it has been repurposed to send peaceful payloads into orbit; in just a minute or so, it was gone from view.

Well, this started a whole new race for me. I had tickets for a 12:45 p.m. flight from Santa Barbara to LAX to BWI. I had to be on console by 9 p.m. Eastern Time for an eight-hour shift while the observatory was doing many of its “once in a lifetime” deployments. Getting from Vandenburg to the Santa Barbara airport was nominally 80 minutes with no issues. I was going to test that. I arrived with 20 minutes to spare, puffing while I got on the old Beech King turboprop that United used for puddle jumping the California coastal airports to LAX.

This was a milk run I had done many dozens of times in the preceding decade (one of our prime instrument contractors was in Goleta, CA). It was sufficiently routine that I was on a first-name basis with many of the crews and the pilots who deadheaded into LAX for work. Today, I was the sole occupant, and the crew knew from the manifest that I was coming. The FO asked why I was so out of breath. I panted out, did you just see that launch? Yes, he did. Well, that launch was mine. I had to get back to GSFC for the second post-launch shift.

The adrenaline high faded from my system as we climbed out of the frequently patchy marine layer. Today, however, it was crystal clear; the next thing I recalled was landing at BWI a bit more than five hours later. To this day, I have no recollection of how I transferred between the Beech and Boeing I flew into Baltimore. I assume the fine folks at United “sleepwalked” me the few gates that separated where the little birds nested at LAX and where the big Boeings and Airbuses took over. It was a different era flying before 9/11, and with close to a million miles on United alone, they took good care of me.

The epilogue to this birthday is that Terra (it was called EOS AM in those pre got-to-have-a-meaningful-name days) is still on-orbit; all of the instruments are still providing useful data. Yes, it’s showing its age with some of the instrument’s features not working as well as they did in its prime. But the lifetime requirement was a better-than-99-percent chance to be fully functional after five years; seven years would be nice.

I could say we were guilty of over-designing, but it was never clear to me how one designs a one-off observatory with no margin beyond the spec. It’s hard to get the statistics when you only have one shot.

As for the impact of the critical global data that the EOS observatories have gathered since 1999 (Terra, Aqua, and Aura), its raison d’être was to either confirm or invalidate the modeling that was predicting a global catastrophe of warming.

Well, that is for a post after I have retired and am beyond the reach of my current employers. Perhaps for Terra’s next birthday.