 I think I've made it pretty clear on all my social media accounts, my tomorrow Spacepods and the tomorrow live show that I think rockets are the best thing ever. And I don't live too far from Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is one of the four major launch sites that are here in the United States. So what's it like to actually go to a rocket launch? Well, this is your Spacepod for January 26, 2016. If you're looking for the ultimate display of brutal power, it's very hard to beat a rocket launch in person. There's nothing like seeing a few tons of exotic metals flying on top of a fuel tank, riding a column of fire all the way up to orbital velocity. In this case, we'd be watching the launch of Jason 3, a NASA Earth Sciences satellite, which just so happened to be perfectly timed to launch on January 17. Right smack dab in the middle of several days off that I had. Now, I go to websites like spaceflightnow.com and nasaspaceflight.com in order to keep up with the launch schedules and see if there may be any changes to when it is actually going to launch. Jason 3 is the next in a long series of satellites that study the oceans that have been a collaboration between NASA and CNES, the French Space Agency. It began in 1992 with Topex Poseidon, Topex standing for a topography experiment and Poseidon representing the Greek god of the seas, which is what Topex Poseidon would study. Using radar and a suite of scientific instruments, it would look at the relative height of the ocean, map global tides, see what the effects of climate change were on the oceans, and improve our overall understanding of oceans here on Earth. A successful mission led to the development of Jason 1, a similar satellite retaining that collaboration between NASA and CNES and launched in 2001 still operating today. With better instrumentation, we now had two datasets to compare. Topex Poseidon lost its operational capability in 2005 and in 2008, Jason 2 was launched. It improved upon the instrumentation even further and now we had both Jason 1 and Jason 2 operational. The world's oceans were sampled completely every five days. And with the launching of Jason 3, scientists will be washing data from three missions simultaneously delivering the science. But what about that launch? Back in 2013, I was lucky enough to see the first launch of a Falcon 9 version 1.1 from Vandenberg, or what's now known as Falcon 9 Flight 6, and it just so happens that with the launch of Jason 3, I might have a chance of seeing the last Falcon 9 version 1.1. And we're on our way out of Los Angeles to get out of this place. We're on our way to Vandenberg right now, which is about 180 miles northwest of Los Angeles. So that means from where I live in LA, it's about a three hour drive. And in addition to that, the nice thing about today is that it is a Sunday, so we don't have to deal with any of the usual terrible traffic that we get in Los Angeles. Although right now, if you look outside of the car, we are dealing with fog on our way out. So obviously, we're hoping that this clears up by the time launch is supposed to occur, which is at 10.42 in the morning, and it's just a little bit before 7 right now. So hopefully everything clears out and we'll get a nice view of the rocket and we'll just enjoy ourselves as we take a nice little Sunday drive to go watch a controlled explosion. So good times. So we're a little over halfway to Lone Poke now in Vandenberg Air Force Base and we've come out of the fog and into the sun and we're hoping that the weather remains really, really, really nice like this on our way out. So we'll just have to see how it works out. We're enjoying a nice drive along the coast right now. Beautiful. Beautiful California. No, I'm talking about Tybalt Manstein. Oh. Oh yeah. That's true. Batman is the best out of everyone. How does he look like Batman? Well, if you took away everyone's, like if you took away Superman's powers, he's just a weak person. He's a weak journalist. Yeah. On the side of the road that we've seen on the way in the Lone Poke today is a confused SpaceX employee. SpaceX employee? No, no, no, no. If we get that guy, he's like, don't. Yeah. So we just stopped off in Lone Poke just to sort of hit the bathroom and then grab some coffee and things to get us ready to go. And we're now heading out to our viewing spot on Ocean Avenue, which is on the southern portion of Vandenberg Air Force Base and should be, well, we're going to hear it for sure if it launches today. But as you can see, we've got a lot of fog to contend with as the weather reports are saying that it's going to burn off before the time of the launch, but it's almost an hour to launch time and it's still looking as thick as it was an hour ago. So we'll have to see and we'll hope that we can see it. Well, we're at our spot that we watched launches from here at Vandenberg. At least the Atlas and the Falcon 9s. It's just that there is a problem. That direction is where the Falcon 9 is right now. You'll notice that there is a lot of fog in the way. We probably won't be looking through that today, unfortunately, to do that. But we're still going to at least enjoy the noise from our rocket today. Get your cameras out now, everybody. This is going to be the loudest fog you've ever seen. I can't get my camera out because we're using it to record audio. Oh, man. Thanks for watching the Space Pod. I'm Jared Head. 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