Mission McClain: Odd ends that didn’t make it into a whirlwind week of Cape Canaveral coverage

Editor’s note: Spokesman-Review reporter Nick Gibson was in Florida last week to report on Anne McClain’s and NASA’s SpaceX launch from the Kennedy Space Center. Online at spokesman.com/sections/return-to-space.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.– A 10-day reporting trip to Florida’s space coast provided invaluable access and perspective to Spokane’s biggest story last week: local astronaut Anne McClain’s return to space.

Readers were provided with up-to-the minute updates on the logistics and technical aspects of the feat of engineering, got to know McClain through those that know her best and heard directly from NASA and SpaceX officials, McClain’s fellow space travelers and, of course, the Lilac City legend herself.

But not all of the information gathered neatly fit into the more than a dozen articles to come out of the trip. Here are some odds and ends related to NASA’s SpaceX Crew 10 mission that couldn’t find a home, but are worth mentioning anyway.

Zags basketball has only been relevant as long as McClain has

During McClain’s first year at West Point, her mother, Charlotte Lamp, remembers that no one had really heard much about Spokane, and certainly not a private school along the namesake river.

McClain and her mother are lifelong fans, so imagine their dismay.

Lamp said she was out to breakfast with the fathers of McClain’s former Black Knights softball teammates one morning when they began chatting March Madness. She brought up the Bulldogs, asking the group what they thought of the team’s chances, “And they went, ‘Who?’ ”

The year was 1999, and Lamp said those fathers soon found out just “who” Gonzaga was as the Bulldogs made their first appearance in the Elite Eight.

“The next year, I got Zags hats for all these basketball dads, and gave them out saying, ‘Now you know who the Zags are,’ ” Lamp said, “They were all fans by her senior year.”

From Stone Age to space travel

The Kennedy Space Center is a sprawling campus.

On that massive base are a lot of employees, or a lot of co-workers for NASA spokeswoman Ashley Atwood. Two of her most unique peers, however, live in gaping holes in the ground in front and behind the NASA News Center.

Those burrows belong to Fred and Wilma, as Atwood nicknamed them, a pair of gopher tortoises. They may not be NASA employees, but they do play an important role for the space agency as “ecosystem engineers,” much like the Pacific Northwest’s beaver.

The undeveloped property on Kennedy Space Center is crawling with wildlife, including several variations of avian birds, gators, tortoises, turtles, manatees and more. The land is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service through the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, which is worth a visit if you find yourself nearby.

Birds and beachfronts

In addition to sharing a border with the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, the space center also neighbors Canaveral National Seashore.

The cape is a birder’s paradise, with more than 300 species found hopping between the three locations, including Sandhill cranes, burrowing owls, bald eagles and vultures, according to the National Park Service.

The seashore side of the island also boasts beautiful sandy beaches that provide a shockingly close view of rocket launches at the neighboring space center. A weeklong entry ticket to the park, including the beaches, costs just $25 per carload, while the space center’s one-day viewing tickets for the Crew-10 launch started at $75.

There’s a saying about getting two things done at once that might be fitting for the cape.

If you’re curious about the accommodations in the area, all we can report is that the Best Western Space Shuttle Inn in Titusville, Florida, is much more ‘Best Wester-ny than it is Space Shuttle Inn-y. The lack of glow in the dark stars and astronaut wallpaper was made up for by the pool, free breakfast and a sunbathing gator that lives out back.

Astronauts get to sleep in on launch day

McClain and company launched around 7:03 p.m. Eastern, and weren’t up and at ’em until less than eight hours before.

One of the several research advancements to come out of the International Space Station is a better understanding of circadian rhythms, the internal clock that regulates sleep cycles. The orbiting laboratory circles the Earth every 90 minutes, meaning those aboard experience 16 sunrises and sunsets each day, alternating every 45 minutes.

The space station’s lighting system helps crews get some shut-eye by simulating daylight through 15.5 hours at full brightness, followed by 8.5 hours of “nighttime” at a much dimmer level. If a doctor has told you to put the phone down before bed, that advice comes in-part from studying how light has affected sleep cycles on the ISS.

Lamp said Crew-10 started adjusting to their ISS sleep schedules weeks before the launch by staying up till 2 a.m. and waking up at 11:30 a.m.

“For several days now, they have been on the ISS timeline, so that they’re alert when they are flying, or whatever you want to call it, cruising, soaring, launching,” Lamp said. “And, of course, when they get up there.”

SpaceX says not to worry about that bit of rocket you saw float away

One of the drawbacks of being on-site for a launch is that you can not keep as close of an eye on the camera feeds aboard the “Endurance.”

But viewers at home may have noticed a large rectangular panel floating away from the Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket after they separated in low orbit.

Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management for SpaceX, said Friday evening that it was just a piece of foam insulation, and nothing to be concerned about.

These insulation tiles are known to sometimes liberate during this separation event,” Walker said. “It doesn’t pose any issues.”

Days after delay were spent at the “Astronaut Beach House”

This tidbit came in after deadline, and well after it would have been newsworthy, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

In response to a query from The Spokesman-Review in a postlaunch conference, NASA leadership said McClain and Crew-10 spent their extra time in Florida at the Astronaut Beach House after the Wednesday launch attempt was scrubbed.

The 1962 two-story bungalow is the lone remaining structure of the Neptune Beach subdivision that called Merritt Island home before NASA moved in and bought the whole subdivision for $31,500 through eminent domain. It’s nestled between launchpads 40 and 41 just over a 100 feet from the shoreline, and has served as a gathering point for astronaut crews for decades.

It’s a longstanding tradition for an outgoing crew to sign a wine bottle, attach a mission logo and leave it behind to serve as a record of all who’ve come through the bungalow, according to NASA. We’ll have to ask McClain when she gets back what vintage Crew-10 left behind.

Delay can be kind of nice, retired astronaut says

Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA’s space operations mission directorate, was a space traveler himself before moving over to the suit-and-tie side of things.

Selected as an astronaut in 1987, Bowersox boasts more than 211 days in space, including five and a half months aboard the International Space Station as mission commander of the sixth expedition. He said a scrubbed launch was a common experience, mentioning a few of his missions where it took six or seven attempts to get him and his crew off the ground.

“I’ve launched on time before,” Bowersox said. “It was rare, but we did launch on time even back in the space-shuttle-era.”

He told The Spokesman-Review that he could not speak to what Crew-10’s experience of a scrubbed launch was like, but that it can be nice to have a few rehearsals under your belt.

“After a while, it gets old,” Bowersox said. “But the first one is kind of nice, because you get a chance to rest a little bit. Usually, people are tired after building up to the launch, and you can catch up with all the notes that you didn’t write down, spend a little extra time with your family.

“Generally, that first scrub is kind of nice, but I don’t know, you’ll have to ask the crew when they come back, what they really thought about it,” he added.