It’s not often that I get to hear that SIMSUP is giving us the finger and saluting us at the same time, but I’ll take it. That was an EVIL set of conditions they threw at us for aerobraking with the OTV, but we got it in one go and hit the target orbit dead on the money.

Hell yeah, y’all. <3

((Art by the ever wonderful Twist!))

A very excited jackal holding up stickers with patches of the Orion spacecraft and Vulcan Centaur rockets printed on them.

Realized just now I didn’t share this anywhere: here’s my reaction to getting the news about how my crew and I were going to space. The first small step on our journey will be launching on the top of a Vulcan VC6 up to the space station, and then taking an Orbital Transfer Vehicle out to the Moon!

* Phoenix 53, d’oh!

So yeah… fun times. The rumor mill is we’re either going up in late December or early January now, depending on some internal discussions and schedule updates involving the Cape and the space station, but yeah… soon, it’ll be our turn in the hot seat. I hope.

So we’re waiting for THAT to get cleared up at the moment, yaaay.
It doesn’t sound horrible, though, all told and our new booster is down at the Cape. Our Orion capsule’s just been hanging out in a clean room in Florida waiting for us, in the meantime. It’s pristine and ready to go.

Phoenix 35 was SUPPOSED to launch on September 15th, but we got pushed back due to fuel depot delays and then the National Reconnaissance Office needed to launch… something… on a Vulcan from Cape Canaveral. Which is fair, I suppose. Except one of the GEM-63XLs had a little whoopsie…

The short version of the past 13 months of my life can be summarized as “AAAAARGH” and “Training”, in equal measure, which sums up a lot of shit right now, all told.
As you can probably tell, though, I am not, alas, on the Moon. Our mission got bumped a bit for a bunch of scheduling reasons.

Well, shoot, you take a long hiatus from this place and it gets busy in a hurry for… reasons we shan’t dwell on.
Anyway, I’m alive, despite my giving the universe the finger on a regular basis! Just been unfathomably busy lately. A jackal’s gotta make money and all that, you know?

Best email I’ve gotten in a very, very long time…
“Mission designation has been verified as Phoenix 53. Launch date scheduled for NET 9/15/24. Training schedule updates will be emailed to the crew on Monday.”

Let’s. Friggin’. Go.

Spent the weekend camping in a pair of lunar rover ground trainers and a MacGyvered-up pair of pressurized “trailers” used for storing things and providing some additional living space.

This actually works FAR better than it has any right to and it’s kinda breathtaking in its simplicity.

Sandra Harris, the anthropomorphic melanistic jackal astronaut, poses for an image on the flight deck of Space Shuttle Horizon with a Natick tube in one hand and the Hubble Space Telescope behind her. Art by @tacorat.com

Still one of my favorite ever pictures. Getting to fix billion dollar space telescopes, fly up to space stations, and working with some of the coolest people I’ve ever met.
I have an AWESOME job and I wouldn’t trade it for the world!
((Art by @tacorat.com, who is BEYOND awesome!))

SIMSUP took a LITTLE pity on us after that one, since they threw a NASTY combination of errors at us on top of that. Last run was just a standard, sweet down the middle aerobrake down to 250 miles above the Earth.

Bwegh… gonna hit the manuals over dinner tonight, I think.

Well, that kinda stung a little.

Second to last training run on OTV aerobraking ended with us coming in WAY too steep and burning up over Hawaii after a reaction wheel failed and a computer went nuts.

There’s probably a tape somewhere of me and Vsevolod cursing like sailors somewhere…

BWAHAHAHAHAHA—ahem.

Well, if anyone’s gonna navigate the wild blue yonder, I think I’m qualified. Ya’ girl Sandra’s over here now, folks, so I’m afraid you can’t escape from jackals with a passion for space THAT easily.