Olivier Forget

I love taking notes. It might be the only effective way for my brain to work. Regardless of the technology involved I always gravitate towards a blank slate of some kind and spill thoughts onto the medium. I used to buy paper notebooks and filled them with barely readable words and other scratches. There were arrows, diagrams, and strike-throughs on every page, and exclamation points inside triangles for when I really meant it.

I flew to Florida to witness in person the awesome power of the Falcon Heavy. My viewing location for the launch of Arabsat 6a was Banana Creek within the Kennedy Space Center, also known as “Feel The Heat” in KSC’s launch viewing nomenclature. It is 3.9 miles due West of the launch pad, as close as one can be for such a launch. I do not want my recollection of this experience to become clouded with time, so here are my notes.

I’ve been meaning to start a blog for a while now. I suppose I took so long to start because I much prefer building things than talking about building things. When I was an aerospace engineer I worked in small experimental shops that routinely produced hardware. We lived by the classic saying “Hardware talks and bullsh– walks” and we had little respect for office-dwelling engineers who only produced theoretical papers.