Off Duty
While the wind blew, the various research groups and the launch crew prepared and tested their experiments and rigs, like fishermen mending nets to get ready for the next big catch. At the end of each day we would check the wind conditions and then give up for the day, leaving the airport to seek dinner and retire to our rooms at the Super-8 for a few hours of personal time and sleep before repeating the routine the next day.
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Scientific balloon launches have been part of NASA’s mission for over 30 years, but in 1977, they were conducted by NCAR– the National Center for Atmospheric Research. NCAR maintained a balloon launching facility in Texas that had all of the equipment and resources to support experiments like ours. Unfortunately, Texas was too far south for our experiment. Instead, we would be operating from makeshift facilities in Aberdeen, a town of 25,000 in an area of South Dakota that offered low population, but enough infrastructure to meet our technical and launch requirements.
There was a regional airport outside of town, and an airplane hangar was provided to house our laboratory field station. We were not the only researchers, however. Groups from other universities were also trying to measure the properties of cosmic rays. We each had a section of the hangar to set up and prepare our experiments for launch. After packing up our instrument and all the essential support equipment from our 4th-floor lab in the Physics building into a rental truck and driving a day west on Highway 12, we arrived in Aberdeen. It took us several more days to recreate an operational cosmic ray field lab in the airplane hangar.
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