Day 1 (Tuesday, Feb. 21)

Yesterday the "advance team" of Steven and I arrived in New Mexico!  The closest airport is El Paso, Texas, which is right on the Mexican border across from Ciudad Juarez.  To get to where we're going you drive about 45 minutes north along the Rio Grande to Las Cruces, where we'll be staying.  From there, you drive east over a pass through a small mountain range, out into the desert valley where the White Sands Missile Range is located.  It's real desert!  Around you, you see only a few desert plants, an occasional tree, the craggy mountains in the distance, and a whole lot of absolutely clear blue sky without a single cloud.  At night the stars are vivid and there's a whole lot more of them than I'm used to seeing from San Francisco!

White Sands Missile Range is a Navy base and NASA has an area they use for sounding rocket flights.  That means several layers of rules to follow…those of NASA, the Navy, Orbital Sciences, and NSRC (the company that NASA contracts with to integrate and fly the rockets).  We've navigated through that web to get access to the base and permission to use our radioactive sources, X-ray generator, and lasers.  This week we'll find out if all those hurdles have been cleared.   One of the biggest rules is, no photos!  But they do have a couple official photographers who can take pictures for us, so I'll post those as we get them.

Today we met many of the folks who work in the NASA part of the base; everyone was very helpful, with several people jumping in to help us unload our two trucks that met us there with all our equipment and the parts of the payload.  We got everything unloaded, unpacked, and set up…tomorrow the real work begins!