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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

With each rocket launch, ‘I have three heart attacks’

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WALLOPS FLIGHT FACILITY: Kurt Eberly has hardly any hair and keeps losing more. His job is to launch, two times per year, a metallic cylinder packed with several tons of supplies, at high speeds toward the International Space Station, 400 kilometres above the Earth.


Eberly heads the Antares rocket program at Northrop Grumman, the US aerospace company that shares with SpaceX a high-value client: Nasa.


Saturday at four in the morning on Wallops Island in Virginia, Eberly was in this Nasa control room, dedicated to rocket launches that are smaller than those taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.


Countdown, three, two, one. Then at the precise moment, the 138-foot tall (42-metre) Antares rocket rose into the dark sky, blasting off in an infernal roar.


At the top of the rocket was a capsule called the Cygnus, made in Italy and loaded with 7,400 pounds (3,350 kilograms) of gear, including meals, clothes for the next crew of astronauts, technical equipment and around two dozen scientific experiments.


After three and a half minutes of flight, the first stage — having burned through all its fuel — detached and fell into the Atlantic Ocean.


The engine of the second stage took over. At T+9 minutes, the rocket was 212 kilometres high, somewhere over the northeast of Puerto Rico, when the launch conductor announced, in a bland monotone: “And we’ve got Cygnus payload separation.” The spacecraft separated at a speed of 7.5 kilometres per second.


On Monday, the spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station, latching on at 7:31 am (1231 GMT) and marking the 10th Cygnus mission so far.


“Every one of these launches, you know, it really gets your heart pumping and I have about three heart attacks each launch countdown,” Eberly said a few weeks earlier in the clean room where the Cygnus is prepared for flight, not far from the launch pad.


“It’s still very stressful just knowing that how much energy is packed into this rocket and it’s all got to be released in the right way.”


On Saturday, after the successful launch, he upped his estimate of cardiac distress.


“I think it’s five, five heart attacks. I lost even more hair. But now it’s an incredible feeling of relief and happiness.”


These unmanned cargo launches have become so commonplace they are almost banal. This year, the ISS will be resupplied by Russian spacecraft three times, Japanese vessels once and US cargo ships five times, between SpaceX and Northrop Grumman.


But space remains a dangerous business.


The latest reminder was the October 11 failure of a Soyuz rocket on its way to the orbiting outpost, forcing the two men on board to eject shortly after launch. No one was hurt. — AFP


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