OK, the shuttle launch. The launch was scheduled for more or less 6:45 am local time and the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex where I was to go opened at 2:45 am. So I took a nap in the late afternoon and by 10 pm I was ready to go. The view along the "Space Coast" here is spectacular at night. I don't have any pictures, but after the sunset on the 26th, the shuttle launch pad is very prominent -- it is lit up by floodlights that can be seen not far from my hotel. It was hazy due to the humidity, but it was still very easy to tell without binoculars where the shuttle was.
I had a lot of time to kill, so I watched the final preparations for launch on TV in the hotel and then after getting onto the space center. I got a "ticket" for a viewing site about 7 miles from the two shuttle launch pads. You can only get bus passes into that area now; all the car passes have been taken into the year 2001! Anyway, the buses started shipping us out to the viewing site around 4:30 am. We listened to loudspeakers that played the launch countdown commentary and waited. The first shot I have is of the sunrise over launch pads south of the shuttle:
Here are a couple of shots of everyone standing around just prior to liftoff:
The countdown was pretty much trouble free and the shuttle Discovery lifted off at 6:49:42 am EDT. Discovery was obscured by some ground "haze" and by the distance. However, once the vehicle cleared its own exhasut plume, it was very obvious. My first shot was a wide angle shot:
The next picture is a zoomed in picture -- both the full frame and a clipped closeup:
At this point, we still hadn't heard anything. The pictures you see on TV are mixed with microphones that pick up the sound much closer to where it is emanating...well, in this case, all we heard was the voice calling out the final countdown and the liftoff announcement. When the sound finally arrived it was loud, but not ground-shaking -- we were too far away for that. The first sounds were from the shuttle main engines, which start prior to launch. That was pretty impressive, but then surprisingly the sound died away quite a bit and then it just got a lot louder! The sound from the solid rocket boosters wasn't just louder, it was a lower/deeper sound. Within a minute, the sound had died down to a faint rumble....here are some more pictures:
At about two minutes, the solid rocket boosters start to burn out:
And then the boosters are jettisoned...leaving the shuttle still visible for few more moments as a small glowing dot -- in the picture below, it is in the lower right:
And then everyone needed to get back on the buses!
Last Revised: 27 May 1999
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