We met from 11:00am until 8:00pm at Brian's house to have our final big team meeting pre-launch. It was a mixed success; it was amazing that we were able to pull everything together two weeks before launch, but it also showed how much work we have left to do in the next two weeks! Much thanks to Brian and Amy who hosted us at the house, and fed us grilled hot dogs and pop.
We met around 5:45pm and discussed BRD logistics and flight status: please see BlackRockLogistics2004
Highlights of the day:
- The airframe team tested the drogue recovery deployment.
- The comm team setup the complete groundstation.
- The avionics team ran around with it's head chopped off, and got a few more steps closer to "Hardware Complete". Bart ran our Ceremonial Run to Fry's for spare and forgotten parts.
- The Flight Computer's 128MB flash disk died, but was resurrected by Ian and Jamey.
- Andrew took only about 1/10th of his basement to Brian's, which constitutes some kind of miracle.
Conclusions:
- We have a lot of work left, especially on avionics and software. Surprise!
- The work really can get done in the next two weeks.
- Final avioncs and software sanity check on Tuesday September 7th (we'll email the results).