LIGO

LISA Pathfinder
December 2015 –
The Launch Story
a group of buildings stood out: freshlypainted
in white and with very trim surroundings,
this proved to be the French
Foreign Legion barracks. I suspect regular
painting must feature in their training…
Harry Ward
Harry Ward leads the space gravitational
wave work at Glasgow.
For LISA Pathfinder the group
built, tested and delivered the
optical metrology system that lies
at its core.
On a bright and crisp 30th November
morning, a group of around
80 scientists, engineers, managers, public
relations experts and press – all with their
different agendas, and emotions – gradually
gathered in a virtually deserted Terminal 3
at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Among
most of the LISA Pathfinder scientists – for
whom launching something they had laboured
hard for over a decade to produce
was a new experience – there was a slightly
nervous air of excited anticipation. But many
others were old-hands at the space business
and seemed very relaxed, at least for now.
Travelling by private Business Class charter
is certainly the way to fly! Extremely wellfed
and “watered” throughout the journey,
we flew to Cayenne, arriving there around
7.30 pm. Shortly after arrival we were on
a bus en-route to Kourou, the town nearest
to the Guiana Space Centre, Europe’s
Spaceport. After a quick check-in to the
hotel – in my case the former prison for
French criminals that were not quite bad
enough to be consigned to the nearby
Devil’s Island – we all convened for a reception.
Launch was due to take place in
the early hours of Wednesday morning,
so we were looking forward to a Tuesday
of spaceport visits before the night-time
build-up to the launch. As well as looking
forward to that, I was also looking just
about everywhere else: I am not an animal
or insect fan, and reports had reached me
of hotel rooms with various forms of wildlife.
Toads, tarantulas, and unrecognised –
but large – flying things had all featured in
dispatches by those who had travelled out
earlier! Fortunately, and probably due in
no small way to the almost overwhelming
amount of DEET applied daily by the entire
group, just about every insect gave us a
very wide berth.
Tuesday dawned hot and humid. After
breakfast we boarded our buses and headed
for the spaceport. A location by the sea
and with a jungle-like climate that is essentially
constant 24/7 clearly presents a challenge
to infrastructure: my overwhelming
impression was that everywhere – even
the high-tech spaceport buildings – was
faintly brown and streaked by rust stains.
As we drove along the route from Kourou,
The Vega launcher, carrying LISA Pathfinder, is all
set for launch after the mobile gantry withdrawal, at
Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on 3
December 2015.
Our tour was fascinating. Standing at the
base of the mobile launch table and looking
up at the full height of an Ariane 5 is
impressive, as is standing at the edge of the
Soyuz launch site blast pit. We also got fairly
close to the Pathfinder launch pad, though
the launcher itself was hidden by the mobile
support building. Then a quick visit to
the on-site launch control centre followed –
with first sight of a ticking countdown clock
– before we headed off-site for lunch.
It was on the bus to lunch that the whispers
started. Someone heard about a launcher
problem. Was it a failure of a thruster, or a
telemetry issue? Or nothing? Brows were
tightening, emails were being studied
closely on smartphones, routine conversations
were quietening so that ears could
tune in to the murmurs. At lunch the buzz
continued; gradually better information
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