Blastoff

This was handoff day, set aside for briefing and training the incoming crew. The new commander, Gus Frederick, was an MDRS veteran, and as the Mars Society's webmaster he'd been reading all the crew reports for heaven knows how long. He wouldn't be coming in cold like we did. Still, he would be coming in with preconceptions. We'd made a lot of improvements, documented a lot of known problems, and written new flow diagrams and procedures, and we wanted to be sure those were handed off smoothly.

I got up at 7 to refuel the generator (Bill, God love him, had filled it at 11PM to give me an extra hour of sleep), and then got about the business of putting the last of my tools away, printing out the last of the procedures I'd written, and finally bringing the car around and packing my things. I deliberately left my laptop for last, because Mission Support still wanted one more XO/Journalist report out of me. This seemed strange given that I was leaving in the early afternoon, shortly after the new crew arrived, and especially given that my "Final Summary Report" had already been submitted. But this is the Mars Society's mission, not mine. I also owed the project one more cognitive state evaluation and social psych questionnaire, and since human factors are a big part of why we were there, I did want to hold my end up.

Crew 26 was efficient because this place demands efficiency; the only alternative is darkness and cold, foul water and uncooked food, lost astronauts and inoperative equipment. And they had a bit of that, more so than we did. This was mostly not their fault, but I'm a human being, and can't help feeling a bit of pride for the fact that we never overflowed the water tank or tripped a single circuit breaker. Of course, they taught us how to avoid these problems, and no one taught them, so they get a big share of the credit for our success. But even so, we'd done a good job with the knowledge they passed along.

Finally I had a shower, so I could come home without reeking, and we sat around watching SPHERE and burning all our pictures onto communal CDs. The new crew was an hour late -- which wasn't bad considering there was a blizzard tearing through the Rockies. But it was fascinating to see the new crew arrive, with their job assignments already worked out, and watch them take in the tour, bright-eyed and a little bit nervous here at the start of their own two-week adventure.

Sadly, I needed to leave 18 hours earlier than the rest of my crew, and the blizzard promised to make my drive back to Denver a long one, so I hurriedly typed up this final report -- the one you're reading right now -- while hastily wolfing down some lunch. Crew 27 had been pretty good about sharing important knowledge between multiple people, so there wasn't really anything I HAD to explain that Bill or Alex or Jim couldn't explain just as easily. But just to feel good about myself I gave a 10-minute briefing on the Remote Radio and the R2 Repeater. And now it's time to fold up the computer and hug my crewmates goodbye. It doesn't feel final, though; we've become too close not to keep in touch. I'll be having dinner with Bill and Jim in a week or so, and I'll visit Alex next month when I'm in L.A.. As for Julie and Pete, there's always email.

This is EV2, ready for recompression. Over and out.