July 26th, 2005

I got to see the shut­tle launch this AM, which was really cool. When I was a lot younger, I had gone to see one with my family but they scrubbed it at the last minute, so I’ve always wanted to see an actual launch live. Oddly enough, I watched it no more than 2 or 3 miles from the same spot I was at as a young lad.

The liftoff was sched­uled for 10:39am, so we planned to head out there at a decent time so we could at least get near the beach before liftoff, while not get­ting *too* near all the traf­fic (some of the people I went with had to be back @ class by 1pm). We actu­ally only got within 10-15 miles of the actual liftoff, but it was still amaz­ing to see how quickly that sucker got off the ground and out of our vision.

As a matter of fact, we just got out of our cars on the bee­line and walked to a bridge to watch the actual lift off. Most esti­mates I read had any­where from a quar­ter to half a mil­lion people con­verg­ing for the launch today. Having a 2-lane express­way just wasn’t enough to handle all that traf­fic from Orlando.

Ever since I was a little kid, I have been infat­u­ated with space flight - that inter­est has waned a bit in my old age, but I still am very inter­ested with the shut­tle and the space pro­gram in gen­eral. After a long hiatus, it’s good to actu­ally get a shut­tle back in the sky. Hope­fully they don’t run into any issues and land safely as well.

As many bad things there are about Orlando, every few weeks I get reminded of the few things that do make it a really neat place. The weather and the beach usu­ally are the ones doing it, but this time it was the shut­tle launch. I won’t miss much of this place, but things like that make Florida unique.

Wel­come! If you're new here, you may want to sub­scribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

2 Responses to “Discovery”

1. little johnny says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 1:17 am

   Yeah i agree cap­tain it was awe­some i liked it alot we still have to go see those rock­ets in a few weeks
2. Daniel Andrews says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 10:26 am

   Yea, they’re launch­ing an Atlas V from the Air Force Base on 8/10. If it’s during the day and there are no classes in the way, I’d want to go too.

   I’m plan­ning on going to see Atlantis lift off if I still live here - that launch is planned for early to mid Sep­tem­ber … but we’ll see if they actu­ally get it off the ground on time. I guess a lot of it hinges on this mis­sion.