Saturday - July 16, 2016
So every year the aerospace community puts on the Aerospace Games. Initially this sounds like a super cool event where we all participate in "Ender's Game" esque activities like building a giant rocket and launching it to a fake Mars out in the ocean or having a dehydrated ice cream eating contest or a growing potatoes in your poop contest. Instead, we play normal games, soccer, v-ball, tug-of-war, human pyramid, watermelon eating, and also shit talking (which seemed to be most popular).
I was as the track all morning so I didn't get to the games until 3 ish. That's just late enough to miss the beginning of all the events which means I was just a spectator. That's okay cause I brought the trusty camera so make these people way cooler than they really are, hahaha. After a great shuttle ride in a school bus driven by a totally random dude bumping some pretty soulful music with a deep groove, I get dropped off in the Dockweiler Beach parking lot. On my way in, I'm thinking "Man I hope that i can find where the games are..." As I scanned down the beach the crowd went: Normal amount of people, normal amount of people, normal amount of people, CRAPTON of people with matching shirts, normal amount of people. Found it.
The Virgin Galactic tent was on the south side of the event. The Spaceship Company (TSC) is our sister company and joined our ranks to form Voltron and put our numbers somewhere in the 50's. A bunch of people are around the human pyramid area so I join in and say hello to some co-workers. For this event, your team runs to these cones and builds a human pyramid as fast as they can; its timed. All I remember about this event is that when our team was called to go, we were missing one person, Alex S. While she did eventually show up to let Nicole off the hook to sub, I'm still going to point out that she almost let her team and her company down, for the sole purpose of remembering her name. Name association people, it works. Anyhow, this is their final stance with Marinelle putting up the Victory "V" or the Virgin Galactic "V" which looks cool but totally effed up my framing, not cool Marinelle j/k. SYMBOLIC SHIT TALKING!
Next up, Tug-Of-War. Its the last event of the day, but luckily, its a bracket so it takes forever, especially when you're awesome like us and keep winning. So our team had already won its first two rounds and was getting lined up for its Elite 8 round. Awesome! What a great opportunity to take pictures! Never mind that everyone that I want as subjects is wearing black shirts, standing with their face in the shadows with a really bright sky. For you non-photographers read: shitty lighting. I suck it up and get into position with my, "Don't worry, I know I'm totally in the way, but I have a camera" attitude. Luckily, I get rewarded. As they count down the start of the game, I pre-focus and lay in wait, like Miles waiting for the laser pointer to come out of the drawer. 3-2-1... PUULLLL!! I see something happening in the viewfinder and just start snapping as I slowly realize that the other team has just let go of the rope sending our team diving into the sand on our ass. LOL. Apparently, the other team was short-handed and decided to just throw the match.
Tug-Of-War win streak: 3
Silent shit talking! Let me put this next picture in context for you non-aerospace people. So most of aerospace is taken up by the big box primes: Boeing, Northrop, Lockeed, Raytheon, NASA JPL... Then there are all the subcontractors: Honeywell, GE, Parker, UTC... Then there are the private small startup style companies, most notably SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. SpaceX has been around for several years and has achieved several notable milestones. Virgin Galactic is much younger and still has a ways to go before we launch anything. Many people at VG are former SpaceX employees, their stories of SpaceX provide many an entertaining lunchtime story. So NOW... look at the picture, think about it, then get the joke.
Round 4, FIGHT! This was a pretty long pull for both teams; somewhere in the vicinity of 40 seconds. Not much here to say except that we emerged victorious! On to the Championship.
Tug-Of-War win streak: 4
The interns agree, thumbs are important.
Enough, enough, let's get to the championship! Winner of this round will become the ultimate, rope-tugging, master of the beach, most bad-ass, super smartest, highest paid, Nobel peace prize achieving, sand between the toes having team in Aerospace Games history, for that day, kinda.
Apparently my camera malfunctioned and I didn't get the picture of us winning the last round, so we'll just say we won and you won't know the difference unless you were there or knows that google has a search engine. Either way, congrats to our team that did 5 pulls in just an hour or so. These guys are first on my hit list when its time to move.
Here's some candids from the rest of the day.
This picture looks planned, but Phil just did a good job photo-bombing Jordan's picture.
The interns! Apparently we pay these guys too much cause they all turned down free chips.
We ended the games at Rock 'n Brews where all the teams went to go have food and drinks. SpaceX came in at some point with their trophy celebrating their victory at the games. It was only fitting that Ocampo and Dennis went to take selfies with the trophy and their shirts. Shit talking complete.
VG ended up 8th overall out of 16-ish teams. Better than last year!
No comments:
Post a Comment