Sorry for light blogging, but Saturday I drove up to the Cape from West Palm Beach, picked up tickets for the 49th Apollo gala, drove over to Orlando, rented a tux, checked into my hotel room, got cleaned up and put on the rented duds, drove back over to Cocoa Beach, took a bus through heavy rain to KSC with other attendees. About 2300, we took the buses back to the Cocoa Hilton, where there was an after party that lasted long enough for us to go out on the beach to watch the Telsat launch of a Block 5, at 0150. Then I drove back to Orlando, fueled the rental car, got three and a half hours sleep, took the car to the airport for flight back to LAX at 0750. After I got home, I did a two-hour stint of The Space Show at 1200 PDT on Evoloterra and the Apollo anniversary, including the fact that next year will be a half century since humans first stepped on the moon (and 46 years since they last did; (only) one of those four remaining men, Harrison Schmitt, was in attendance at the gala).

Then, yesterday afternoon, I had to unpack and repack, and make final changes on my poster for this week’s ISS R&D conference in San Francisco. This morning, I had to go rent another car, and I’ll have to go pick up the poster at Staples on my way out of town, then drive up to Berkeley to stay with friends, to be at the conference tomorrow.

IOW, blogging may be light this week.

[Update a while later, before hitting the road]

Ken Kremer has the story on the Falcon Telstar launch that much of the media ignored.

They performed a high-altitude escape test today, apparently successfully, and it carried a lot of experiments. I hope this is their last milestone before flying test passengers.