GYRE 2003

[gfish]

As most of you know, since I rarely pass up an opportunity to talk about it, in 2003 and 2006 the GYRE project, of which I was a member, flew on NASA's Vomit Comet. Excuse me, Weightless Wonder. Since it is mostly an outreach program, NASA provides almost as many videographers and photographers on the flight as crew members, so it's well documented. I recently booted up the archive disk where I had encoded the SVHS tapes they gave us in 2003, decided to throw them up on youtube. (Turns out I never ripped the DVDs of the 2006 flight, but since I'm on this video archiving/offloading kick, I think I'll try to get those done this weekend.)



Hypobaric chamber ride, where you learn what hypoxia feels like. It feels like being drunk to me, quite pleasant and very dangerous.


The Test Equipment Data Package review, were very serious NASA dudes (some of whom have a say in rather or not the Shuttle flies) look at your experiment and ask very pointed questions about why it isn't going to explode and kill everyone on the flight. If they find a problem, you have less than a day and very limited resources with which to fix it. A singularly stressful experience.


Flight day 1


Flight day 2

Comments

[keystricken.livejournal.com]

Damn, that looks like fun. Thanks for sharing!

[solarbird]

God damn I want to do that someday. XD

[gfish.livejournal.com]

It's a lot easier these days with Zero Gravity Corporation...

[ionan.livejournal.com]

Awesome. Liked the bit where you were trying to adjust things via the laptop, but kept floating away.
Btw, what was the counting that the woman's voice was doing in the last video? She kept counting to five, but I couldn't connect it to anything that was going on.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

She was with Harvard Medical testing zero-G CPR techniques; she was counting compressions. IIRC.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

Are these as good as the SVHS originals, or were they downsampled when you captured them the first time?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

These were uploaded from full-quality DV capture files. You're welcome to try, but I don't think it can get much better than this.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

No, I'm well prepared to believe this is as good as the NASA tapes.:)

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

(What about the video we shot? On your D8 or hi-8 or somesuch?)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

That was the 2006 flight, using my miniDV camera. I still have the tapes, but it would take a lot of editing to make something interesting out of it.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

That was the 2006 flight, using my GL2 (mini-DV). I still have the tapes, but it would take a lot of editing to get anything interesting out of that stock.

[feylike.livejournal.com]

i enjoyed watching these. thank you for sharing!

[slantiness.livejournal.com]

I would want to be one those floating videographers!

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a pretty sweet gig. They really get into it -- one of them got distracted going for an interesting shot in 2006 and fell on our control laptop when gravity returned. They cut that out of the edited video they gave us, sadly.