Even at the distance I was from the launch, it was fucking nock-your-socks-off breath taking. TV really doesn’t do it justice. Your puny human mind can’t wrap around how absurdly big the shuttle is and the fact that it is flying straight up despite being the size of a building. You could even see people getting choked up a little (I among them). When you are watching the shuttle take off you can’t help but behold it and think “Wow. Humans kick ass”.

Yeah, the shuttle program might be absurdly bloated, the shuttle itself might be an expensive piece of shit, and NASA might have developed a schizophrenic relationship with safety, but that doesn’t change the fact that a fucking building sized spaceship is going straight up in the air on a plume of fire to go hang out in an environment so hostile that only humans and a few hibernating bacteria can go there and live. Like I said, it is awesome to the point of almost being religious.

http://twitter.com/NASA

and watching the first series of “Defying Gravity”: a small masterpiece of SCI-FI TV!

http://bit.ly/lHQOv

As luck would have it, this time I was on vacation in Florida but on the opposite side of the state! I viewed it from the 6th floor balcony of our hotel on St. Pete Beach. It was breathtaking, I had no idea the view would be so nice to view from such distance!

I’m from Illinois, so this is the first time I saw a launch with my own eyes. Its tough for non-Floridians to see a launch, given the unpredictable variables that can alter launch schedules by days… weeks… months. But after this I’m going to NEED to try again and again to get tickets to see a launch from up close before they retire the fleet!

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/spacevidcast

http://www.youtube.com/user/spacevidcast

sarchi

See, we helped the mission :)

Five decades in the space business and NASA still hasn’t figured out that nobody looks good in orange.

I’d assume they’re not supposed to look good in orange, they’re supposed to look highly visible e.g. bobbling in the water after some sort of horrible disaster over the middle of the Atlantic.

(To match orbits with the Space Station, the Shuttle launches on a trajectory that takes it over the southern UK about twenty minutes after lift-off. If it’s early dawn or late dusk here at the time, it’s possible to see the Orbiter and ET as they pass overhead.)

And yet, our astronauts choose to suffer through it and soldier on. Now that’s dedication. :)

So maybe they’de be harder to see, but you know how great they’d look, stepping into the dock in deep blue, Crimpleneâ„¢ leisure suits, with gold lamé trim, complete in matching gloves and slippers.

Yee-ooozzaah!

Good to know I’m not the only one. It kinda gets you right there.

Oh, dear. Horizontal stripes.

Skirts.

One of the selling points of “Space: 1999″ was that the moon base costumes were created by some high-priced designer.

fwiw, a number of us from work meetup at the international space museum to watch the launch in second life at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Alpha/48/78/24/ . if you have an computer with a reasonable graphics card, join us for the next one!

there’s also a group at the NASA CoLab / Neil Armstrong Library next door that does the same thing; usually with conversation and storytelling afterwards. i _almost_ got to tell my “and i looked out the hotel window and realized it was the shuttle” story.

http://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s163/Renny1825/TheRockyHorrorPictureShow.jpg

except with winged heels and diagonal-cut gloves up to the elbow, and with all-over coverage for that whole annoying space-is-a-vaccuum thing (how rude).