3...2...1...

I finally got to see a shuttle launch all up-close-and-personal!

I often disparage the local news channel, especially after having been edited to sound like an absolute ignoramus, but one thing they do really well is NASA coverage. I just happened to see, sometime on Friday, that there was a shuttle mission scheduled to launch early Monday morning. And, most fortuitously, I am on Spring Break right now, so even if it had been scrubbed, I still had a week's worth of early mornings available! AND it was scheduled for 621a, about 30 minutes before sunrise. I thought I had totally missed my last chance for a night launch in August, but no! Hooray! So I immediately made plans to drive to the coast. Which brings me to this morning:

At 200a, after grading papers for what seems like a fortnight, I made myself a travel-mug of coffee, packed up a bag and a lawn chair, and drove off towards Titusville. I was aiming for Space View Park, across the Indian River from Cape Canaveral. It took about 40 min to get there from home (not so on the way back...), and at T-2.5h, there were a fair number of people out and about, but I was able to get free parking within a couple blocks. Before I even got to the park, I noticed a grassy area right up on the water in front of a condo building, and with some prime seating available. So I dropped anchor there, between two palm trees, about ten feet from the shore, with a clear view of the floodlit launch pad. The only thing missing was the park's live control-room audio, but I did have (read: steal) someone's free wireless signal, which meant I could follow the launch blog. And besides, once things get going, you know it!

There was a quiet electricity running through the still-small crowd, and people of all ages were sleeping on blankets on the ground, waiting. The hush was almost reverential. I had packed my ipod, a book, and some knitting to pass the time, but after being up for almost 24h by that point, all I wanted to do was sleep. I was wearing pants, a sweatshirt, and a turtleneck for the 50-something-degree air, and as I was getting out of the car, I thought "why do I need my blanket, it's fine out?". Fool. I know exactly when the lowest temperature of the day happens (right before sunrise), and I hadn't taken into consideration any shoreline breeze when I made that judgment. So, without the expectant giddiness of an imminent shuttle launch, I'd have been pretty miserably cold and sleepy. I managed to nap in my lawn chair for about 20 minutes or so. Checked the blog - everything was still go for launch. There had been some concern about fog and low cloud, but it was perfectly clear. I curled back up in my chair and got another 20 min of sleep. I woke up just in time to miss the ISS passing overhead (grrr). I looked behind me and the crowd around me had quadrupled and had a completely different energy about it. 20 minutes to launch! In what seemed like hardly any time at all, I heard a shouted countdown from one of the viewers somewhere behind me!

I hadn't taken much photographic equipment - no tripod, no telephoto, etc, just my phone (for video) and handheld SLR - because I wanted to actually experience the launch, not "watch" it with my nose stuck behind a viewfinder, trying to get a good shot. I partially succeeded. The photographer in me, though, couldn't help herself (especially with all the tripods set up around me), and I wound up still trying to make some pictures. My photos turned out pretty crappy, but they're not meant to be art, just mere snapshots for my own memory.

It lifted off, and, boy, is the view across the water at night something else! While the first splashes of pre-dawn blue spread across the eastern sky, Discovery rose pretty high pretty fast. It still took a while (a couple minutes) for the sound to finally reach us. It was unlike anything I'd ever heard. A constant, rolling rumbling thunder that just kept going. Spread out over us like ripples in a pond. It's amazing what 30-miles-closer-to-the-coast does for viewing. Shuttles always take off towards the northeast, away from home; as it gets downrange, it gets harder and harder to see, especially with the curvature of the earth and houses and trees obscuring the horizon. Not so on the ocean! We could see it clearly and high for a long time. Even solid-booster-rocket separation (for which everyone cheered - so cute!). As it continued to slip the surly bonds of Earth, this lovely comet-like corona formed around it. I'd never seen anything like it before.

And of course, all that water-vapor spewed into the mesosphere makes for some stunning clouds, particularly after sunset. One of the most beautiful launches (and subsequent clouds) happened about a year ago, just after sunset, also with Discovery. Same lighting, except back-lit instead of from the front. As the sun sank below the horizon to us, it left just the top part of the exhaust trail brightly illuminated, then splashed it with reds and oranges against the inky sky. This time, as the shuttle rose, the sun spot-lit the very top of the trail and continued to illuminate more and more of it as the sky grew lighter.

I stuck around for about 20 minutes after the launch, knowing that trying to get into my car and head back out was a ridiculous idea. Besides, I hadn't actually made it down to the park, and I was praying for a bathroom. I wandered over to the park, which was clearing out, and I was really glad I'd set up camp where I did. The park is nice, but I feel like I had a better viewpoint with far fewer trees and people. I milled around, taking pictures of the filaments of cloud that were starting to tangle and twist in the jet stream. Finally joined the bathroom line, then headed back to the car.

I'm eternally grateful for the GPS in my dashboard, and I realized that I could probably circumvent some traffic if I headed south and joined up with I-95 one exit south of the one I took. Foolish move #3 (#1 was the 24oz of coffee in my system with no bathroom nearby, in case you were keeping track). The on-ramp to I-95 for which I was heading was closed. I don't know what the deal was, but I wound up taking a circuitous route involving SR50 through Christmas, 520 back southeast to the Beeline (SR528) and finally home. After about 2.5 hours! In retrospect, I'd have slept in my car for an hour, grabbed breakfast in Titusville as the rest of the tourists were clearing out, and gotten home at the same time a bit better-rested. Lessons learned.

Nevertheless, I can't wait for the next one! There are only about four left, if we're lucky. I can't help but wonder what will befall the area when the space program changes with the demise of the Space Shuttle program. The Space Coast already seems like a bit of an anachronism, what with the low-rise mid-century ranch homes and this late-60s mystique about the place. You expect to see government engineers with short-sleeve dress-shirts, pocket protectors, and heavy black-framed glasses working in fluorescent-lit offices with acoustical tile and green metal file cabinets. Very I Dream of Jeannie. Some of my compatriots in the bathroom line were of an age that made me think they'd lived on the coast since the inception of the space program, when their husbands (or maybe even they, but that glass ceiling hasn't been cracked for that long), took a job at the insistence of a young president on an otherwise sleepy beach in Florida some forty years ago. They'd probably seen hundreds of launches - rockets and shuttles, successes and failures - and yet they still come out at dawn for one more before the fleet is mothballed.

I have mixed emotions about the shuttering of shuttle flight with no viable alternative, save for some private-venture upstarts. I'm all for progress, and I know that programs get scuttled and funding gets cut, but the space program seems to be dying a slow graceless death even as Discovery gracefully takes wing above it all. Is the Last Frontier nothing but boring to us now? Maybe it's a symptom of a greater trend - as we look around more at ourselves and less to the heavens.