BERKELEY, Calif. _ At noon Tuesday _ 30 hours before a satellite was supposed to launch _ the head of the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Lab sent an alarming email.
"Here's an update on the impact of the power shutdown," it began. "Overall, we are not optimistic we can pull this off but we are working as hard as we can to make it happen, if everything falls our way."
If PG&E's power outage went as planned, it would not only close schools, spoil stores of ice and food supplies, and darken thousands of homes, it would also disconnect the UC Berkeley lab. The team, which built NASA'S ICON satellite, needed power to monitor its scheduled takeoff Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
As cities braced for PG&E's mass preemptive power shutdown, the director of mission control headed out to buy extension cords. So began a DIY effort to jerry-rig the science lab and keep the fallout from PG&E's outages confined to Earth.
"I said, get over to Home Depot and buy some stuff," said Steven Beckwith, director of the Space Sciences Lab and a professor of astronomy at Cal. "We were concerned we would have to scrub the launch."
