Showing results for Carl Pinkham

Years of intense research, rescheduled dates and much preparation led to the successful launch of SpaceX CRS 10 at 9:39 am EST on Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Rodent Research-IV (RR-IV) mission is a collaborative research project between the United States Army Medical Research and Materiel […]

Photo Courtesy of Duong Cong Minh’s Flickr On September 1, 2016 we received word of an explosion that occurred on the LC40 pad were SpaceX was conducting static firing testing. Even though this was not a NASA mission due to the damage on the pad it is expected that the SpaceX-10 launch date will be […]

Photo Courtesy of SpaceX Flickr Page As you may have heard, early last Monday morning (7/18/16) SpaceX-9 was successfully launched.  This successful launch means that our launch date is “firm” for Veteran’s Day, November 11, 2016, barring weather or any other issues.  Since Dr. Kacena is a VA non-clinician scientist, our laboratory has DoD funding, […]

Have you ever tried to plan something a month or even 6 months in advance? Did everything go as planned? If you are married or have previously planned a wedding, try to think back to that planning process where 6 months or even a year in advance you were trying to plan out the entire […]

The launch date was set back once more to November 11th 2016. We are feeling really good about this date because it happens to fall on Veteran’s day. This might bring us a bit of luck for a more stable/secured launch date as our mission was funded by the Department of Defense to help find […]

Everything I wrote about earlier in the blog: Getting Ready for NASA Ames Testing (a reflection on the past in preparation for the future ), we had to do to prepare for our time at KSC, plus a number of additional requirements.  We will have more extensive background checks conducted and this time I will […]

Save the date! As they say, the fifth times the charm, or do they? Once again our August launch date has been moved due to things out of our control. The date was pushed further this time to November 21, 2016, the Monday before Thanksgiving. We have been told that this was due to  2 […]

As I was writing the Blank Slate Blogs, Parts 1 and 2, I realized I had never discussed the hurdles we had to overcome to be given access to NASA Ames Research Center for our launch simulation testing; many of which we cleared just in the nick of time. As you can imagine, the NASA […]

A Historical Launch and Landing! I just watched the launch and landing of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. This is the first launch of a dragon capsule which is headed to the ISS since the unfortunate explosion last summer. This is great news for the US space program as well as for our […]