Everyone has a reason and a means for going on a trip. Earlier this year, April and I took a two-week, second-honeymoon-like trip to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Our reason? Anthony Bourdain. Our means? VIPIR.
…Huh???
The “reason” originated back in the spring of 2013. Obviously, the beauty and thrills of the Pacific Northwest are enough of a reason for anyone to plan a trip there. But a noted sarcastic food and travel critic was our catalyst.
I was hanging out at my friend Jones’ house, doing some man-bonding while we waited for our significant others to return from a “ladies’ day”. Jones and I had gone to an event at the Heavy Seas Brewery earlier that day and had literally walked 5 miles back to Baltimore since we couldn’t find a ride home. Dead-legged and boozed-out, we popped in an episode of Travel Channel’s “The Layover” into the DVR. The premise of this show is that Anthony Bourdain, infamous foodie and travel aficionado, stops over in a major city for 48 hours and dabbles in as much culinary and touristy exploration as he can within that time frame. This episode focused on Seattle. In the below clip (sorry about the low quality), Bourdain and some local chefs discuss the allure of the Pacific Northwest.
Maybe it was the delicious-looking food, or the picturesque cinematography of the Seattle cityscape, or Bourdain’s humorous interactions with the locals, but for whatever reason, watching this show lit a fire under me to go visit Seattle. Neither of us had ever been anywhere close to the Pacific Northwest. I started planning a visit for summer 2014, solely to Seattle. Eventually it grew to become Seattle and Vancouver. Then Portland, Seattle, Vancouver and stuff in between. Then finally Oregon-Washington-British Columbia with a 7-day Alaskan cruise leaving from Vancouver tacked onto the end (because if you’re gonna go that far northwest, why not keep going?)
After seeking much advice from family, friends, and coworkers, we finally booked the cruise and flights on Christmas Eve 2013. Soon we were booking expenses like airport transportation, rental cars, hotel rooms, ferry rides, rafting trips, even a helicopter tour of a glacier. I’ll be the first to admit that there’s no way we could’ve afforded all this without some help from a little guy named “VIPIR”.
The VIPIR Inspection Tool (Credit: NASA)
VIPIR stands for Visual Inspection Poseable Invertebrate Robot. My work at NASA Goddard is aimed at demonstrating how to robotically repair an orbiting satellite that has run out of fuel. VIPIR is a robotically-held inspection tool with a three-camera arsenal. The most impressive of these is a tiny “borescope” camera on the end of a flexible snakelike appendage that can be deployed into the bowels of a spacecraft. Think of it like giving a colonoscopy to a satellite! We built and tested this instrument over a short two-month period in early 2014, then had it launched to the International Space Station in July. It’ll be used by the station’s robotic arm some time in 2015, thereafter becoming the smallest camera ever used in space.
VIPIR’s Tiny “Borescope” Camera (Credit: NASA)
So this is where the “means” comes in. Like usual, our project office gave us a wildly complex instrument to build and test and a relatively short amount of time to do it in. Our parts started arriving in late January and we were slated to deliver it to Johnson Space Center in Houston at the end of March. This meant two months of near 7-day workweeks with grueling 10- to 16-hour days. I usually work a “9/80” schedule, meaning that I squeeze 80 hours into nine business days every two weeks. This was more like a “12/150”.
The positive byproduct of this schedule was overtime. I may have hated my life for a few months, but I knew that I was storing up a necessary monetary reserve for our trip. We finished up VIPIR one day ahead of schedule and successfully delivered it to Houston on March 24th. At this point, it was a little over a year since I first watched that fateful episode of “The Layover”. We were now two months away from going on this amazing trip, and somehow we had Anthony Bourdain and VIPIR to thank for it.
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