GPS IIF-2 Wet Dress Rehearsal - SpacePod 2011.06.09

Jessica Rye: Good morning, we're here today at space launch complex 37. And what you see behind us is actually a Delta IV rocket. It's going to be launching the GPS 2F-2 satellite in July. What's going on behind us is we are moving the mobile service tower. And that is the giant building that you see moving away from the rocket right now. That building that we're moving right now weighs just over 9 million pounds (4 million kg). It's about the height of a football field and we're actually going to move it an entire football field back so that we can conduct this wet dress rehearsal today, which is in preparation for our launch. Captain Stephen Nielson: So what you're looking at is the GPS 2F-2 wet dress rehearsal. What it is is a ULA operation and what they're doing is they're going to be rolling the mobile service tower back and then fueling the Delta IV booster. Basically what they're trying to do is verify that the booster is fully functional and basically they're trying to iron out any of the kinks in the fueling system before the spacecraft arrives and is mated to the booster. Basically the GPS satellites are manufactured out in California and they're fully tested out in California and once a satellite is ready to go, they'll ship it here to the Cape. The GPS 2F-2 satellite will ship to the Cape on April 20th very early in the morning. And basically what we did is we received the spacecraft, transported it into an area called Area 59 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where we unpackaged it from the shipping container and then perform a few weeks of compatibility testing and post-factory functional testing of the spacecraft. Doug Lebo: Hi! Welcome to the LCC. Doug: Well, today we're performing a wet dress rehearsal, what we call a WDR. And in that test we are loading cryogenic fuels, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen onto the Delta rocket to validate the vehicle's readiness prior to erecting the spacecraft. Jason Rhian: So basically the whole intent is to make sure that you don't have the spacecraft all the way up there and then you find a problem that you have to fix with the rocket and take it all back off again. Doug: Exactly. Jason: Now, the wet dress rehearsal, how long does that basically encompass here? Does it take the whole day? A couple hours? How long does it take? Doug: Ah, it's pretty much the whole day. The countdown from the start of it till T-0 is about 12 hours and then after that we have de-tanking to take the propellants back off the rocket and securing usually takes overnight. So overall it's almost a 24 hour operation. Jason: Really? Almost an entire day? Doug: Right. Jason: Went out to the launch pad, saw the rocket. It was amazing! It was different seeing it in that configuration. And the good folks at ULA took us around, showed us all this really cool stuff and then we are about to head out and I see this replica. I'm a big replica model fan. And then I look up ... And as you can see, when they got the replica here, they didn't quite understand that the replica was taller than the ceiling, so they had to modify the ceiling and put this concave section so that the rocket would fit.