GEORGE DILLER: Sixty-six minutes, 45 seconds now into the Dawn mission,
with Dawn now on its way to the asteroid belt.
And we're joined here at the console with our NASA launch director, Omar Baez,
who will give us a brief recap on how the countdown went this morning.
I guess we went into it a little bit concerned about the weather,
but I guess that didn't really pan out to be too much of a concern, did it?
OMAR BAEZ: We were expecting it to get a little bit
worse and get some of those showers over the pad,
but Mother Nature worked with us and kept it down toward Patrick.
That's about as close as it got to us, so the weather cooperated,
a really quiet count and had no excitement up until the end,
when we had a ship out in the drop zone for the solid motors.
And we held and retargeted the middle of the window,
worked through all the resets to get there, and --
DILLER: And what affected the closure, the collision avoidance?
BAEZ: Well, we had the International Space Station cutting
out a couple of minutes of our window.
It was from 7:27 to about 7:33 where we had a conjunction with the
International Space Station, so we were still targeting the middle of the window,
which was outside of that range. So that really didn't affect us much.
DILLER: And I guess what's a little bit interesting is in the countdown dress rehearsal,
we actually practiced how we would manage a boat coming into the area.
That's why we do these simulations, I guess.
BAEZ: That's why we do these simulations, so that we're cool and
collective and able to react on the fly.
DILLER: So what, so far, can we say about the trajectory of the spacecraft,
in terms of how the Delta II performed and where it put it in terms of its mark?
BAEZ: The Delta II Heavy has performed well. We're exactly where we want to be.
The first stage, the second stage and the third stage were all nominal.
Nothing funny in the data so far. And from what we see in the orbits,
we're right on the money and just waiting for the spacecraft to
get over their ID ascent stations and make sure they're doing alright.
DILLER: Well, we have, interestingly, another Delta II Heavy as our next launch coming up.
Can you tell us a little bit about that one?
BAEZ: That will be GLAST, and that should be the first quarter-ish of next year,
and will be from the same pad here, 17-B.
And that will be a Goddard Space Flight Center mission.
DILLER: Well, Omar, thanks very much and congratulations,
and we'll look to being back here again early next year.
BAEZ: Thank you, George.
DILLER: Thanks a lot. That will conclude our coverage now of the Dawn mission.
As we said, there will be a post-launch press conference
to give us the Dawn state of health at 1 p.m. Eastern time.
And at this time, we are awaiting contact with Dawn through the
Goldstone tracking station in California, which will come somewhere
between 90 minutes and two hours after launch.
This concludes our launch coverage for Dawn. At 70 minutes,
40 seconds into the mission of the Dawn spacecraft, this is Delta Launch Control.