Where Rockets Going Up Unexpectedly Interfere With Rockets On Schedule

by Aero-News Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

The second day of the Countdown to the X-Prize Cup dawned early -- 0700 Mountain Time, Jim had a deep, deep, deep, background briefing at Las Cruces International with one of the exhibitors.

The plan, or I should say, Plan A, was, he was going to attend the briefing, then run me down to the Museum in Alamogordo where the events of the day were taking place. Plan B was for me to attend a further briefing/interview at Las Cruces at 1100 and then both of us to bail to Alamogordo in time for a 1400 Press Conference.

Of course, Frederick the Great wrote, "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy," and of course in aerospace journalism no plan survives contact with reality. (Or maybe it's reality that doesn't survive contact with aerospace journalism). Jim ran into so much information at the background briefing that he was still there at 10 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, GMT-6). And at that point he was watching a fueling operation for test flight of a rocket-powered vehicle, of which more later.

Here we've run into the second problem with this Countdown to the X-Prize schedule -- the tyranny of Western US distances. Yahoo Maps says allow TWO HOURS to get there from here. Yowtch. If Jim had his plane, it would be a trivial trip, but the plane's in annual. If I had a car, we could split up, but I left my drivers' licence on my kitchen table at home, so I can't rent a car. I also left at home the Garmin GPS 396 that we are testing; this would have been an ideal chance to wring it out).

Fortunately, we've already run a piece about New Mexico's rocket history, here so we've covered most of the points being made today. Still, we're going to try to run to the museum when we can.

This dispatch will be updated when we've got a little more to tell you.

FMI: www.xpcup.com, www.xprize.org, www.spacefame.org