GEORGE DILLER: This is Pegasus Launch Control, T-44 minutes, 37 seconds and counting.
The L-1011 now en route to the drop box location off the coast of Monterey. And with us now is Garrett Skrobot,
the mission integration manager for ST5 from the Kennedy Space Center, and Garrett has been involved with this mission from the beginning,
because you've really sort of worked the spacecraft side and the vehicle side. Is that right?
GARRETT SKROBOT: That's correct, George.
DILLER: He's going to look, look at a tape now that picks up the flow at a hangar where the Pegasus was,
and we'll see a little bit of the spacecraft being readied to be mated to the Pegasus and then the rest of the activity.
So, if we can roll the tape now, Garrett, if you can tell us what we'll be seeing over in the...
SKROBOT: OK. Well, what we see here is the Pegasus launch vehicle. They're putting on what we call the aft skirt.
The aft skirt is an accumulation of multi parts, it controls the fins and the upper rudder.
The fins controls the vehicle during first-stage flight. Right here you see the technicians bolting it in.
This right here is a good shot of the, one of the fins going on on the aft end.
They're carefully lining it in, making sure all the clearances are good before they go in and put the final bolts in.
This will control the vehicle for the, for the first 90 seconds.
Here we go, we're looking at the first stage being mated into second stage of the Pegasus XL.
The third stage also has the avionics section, which is on the forward end. They carefully bring it in to line it up once again.
Technicians here bolting down the third stage into the second stage, making the measurements of the disconnectors.
DILLER: And these are all Orbital Sciences team members?
SKROBOT: Yes, Orbital Science team. They performed this task for us.
And here they are ratcheting in the hardware and lining up the bolt holes, be sure things are proper before they start putting the bolts in.
They torque them down. And then there'll be a separation system that'll be executed to separate the two stages during flight.
Here we have the spacecraft being uncovered in 1555,
the Orbital facility, over in 836.
The spacecrafts are already mounted onto the payload support structure and are hoisting it up and are going to mount it over to their
mounting dolly or work dolly they perform the work with. They did this about middle of January timeframe is when they arrived over
in 1555 to start the processing in the facility to get ready to integrate into the vehicle.
DILLER: 1555, that's what we call the Pegasus hangar, I guess.
SKROBOT: Yes, it is. That's what the Pegasus vehicle is processed in.
And they're doing their functional testing to make sure everything's OK for transport. And here they're in their clean room tent.
They clean to 100,000. Here they perform what they call a "pop-and-catch" test to make sure their separation systems are working properly.
This is the, the mating of the payload support structure onto the avionics section. And they'll line it up, right there. That was one of the gas thrusters.
DILLER: So that's actually the upper stage?
SKROBOT: That is the upper stage, the stage with the avionics ring right there
And technicians bolt it in, torque it in. We don't have a separating system, the spacecraft provides their own separation systems.
So, here they're doing a blacklighting inspection before they get the fairings put on.
You can see right here, this is the first half of the Pegasus XL fairing,
and they're lining it up and putting it into position. This is very time consuming. You want to make sure that everything's lined up.
The fairings will be used to protect the spacecraft in the dense part of the atmosphere as it flies, it increases the acceleration,
and then it'll be released once the heating around the vehicle is reduced to a certain point.
As you can see, everybody's in the bunny suits, it's in a clean room environment. We're trying to make sure we keep the spacecraft as clean as possible.
DILLER: I guess the fairing is coming off after we're out of the atmosphere, is that right?
SKROBOT: That's correct. There's a heating requirement, we want to make sure that a heat the spacecraft up as it goes through the atmosphere.
Here's the second half of the fairing coming in, and here in a second you'll see, once more cleaning. What they do is they'll do an alcohol wipe,
sweep of the fairing to clean any kind of particles away from the mylar liner inside the fairing itself.
They want this as clean, to be inspected and reassembled.
Here we have the rollout, the vehicle, spacecraft's mated, fairing is encapsulated and the vehicle's getting ready to roll out to the L-1011.
DILLER: I guess that was earlier this week.
SKROBOT: Friday, Friday morning they performed this task. And it goes very slow.
Here we have the L-1011, you can see it's jacked up a little bit so when the Pegasus arrives...
You see it was a little bad weather that day, and some of the operations was delayed a little bit, but the team held in there and got it worked on.
It gets wheeled in from the aft side of the belly of the aircraft. They get into position. A little touch there, to push it up in there.
DILLER: Now, does the rocket go to the airplane, does the airplane go to the rocket, or is it a combination of both?
SKROBOT: Here, well, here's where they're putting the rudder up. The rudder had to be taken removed,
so we could get the rocket up underneath it, and then they put the rudder back on it again.
It was a combination of the two, they bring the rocket up to the L-1011. Here they are putting the rudder back on. And then we took off this morning.
DILLER: Well, I guess with weather looking good, and I guess the one issue we had,
I guess turned out to be something that's totally acceptable for launch today. I guess we're targeting, I guess...
SKROBOT: Will be 14:25...
DILLER: 14, yeah, that's going to be 6:25 Pacific Time. Well, Garrett, thank you very much, and we'll look forward to having you back on your next mission.
SKROBOT: Thank you, George.
DILLER: Thank you. At T-36 minutes, 50 seconds and counting, this is Pegasus Launch Control.