Well…pooh…

The Kennedy Space Complex sits fifty miles, more or less, due east of the “Wuthering Heights” parking lot, This doesn’t give us a bird’s eye view of Shuttle launches, but it’s usually worth going downstairs to watch them streak away. (We can see other rocket launches, too, but they’re so much smaller that it can be hard to differentiate them from jet contrails.) Night launches are especially good to watch — I’ve been in the parking lot when the entire eastern horizon turned a rusty red.

So, I had high hopes for tonight, since this is apt to be one of the last night launches. After Friday’s storms and Saturday’s wind, yesterday and today have been perfect early-spring weather with low humidity and widely scattered clouds, but that must have changed after sundown because when I went downstairs (through experience I’ve learned that I can watch local TV until the Shuttle’s cleared the launch tower and still make it to the parking lot in time) I realized I couldn’t see Orion overhead, which meant that there was a high cloud deck.

Two intrepid neighbors were already in the lot when I got there. We used to meet out in the middle of Main Street for the night launches, but Leesburg’s grown in the ten years since I moved here. The city no longer turns the street lights off at 8PM and one really doesn’t want to bump into the people one might bump into at 2:30AM, even with friends on either side.

We stood there a few minutes, telling each other that it had to be the clouds and worrying that it wasn’t. After about five minutes we retreated to one friend’s first-floor condo where we saw that the Shuttle had launched successfully…and promptly disappeared into impenetrable clouds at 10,000′ I guess, they really had to get it launched right now, because NASA doesn’t like losing visual contact with the Shuttle.

I’m glad they’re safely on their way, although I’ve never been convinced that the Shuttle was a good and I’m absolutely convinced that the Space Station is a complete waste of time and money. But I don’t have any pictures to post…not of tonight’s launch, anyway.

Back in 1997, before I actually moved to Florida, I house-sat for my folks for two weeks during which time KSC launched a Shuttle to the MIR space station. MIR launches were almost always night launches and I decided that I’d drive over to the coast to see it. It never occurred to me that I might have trouble finding a good viewing spot — and I probably wouldn’t have, if it had been a daylight launch, but at night, on unfamiliar roads, I wound up on a road I shouldn’t have been on and got emphatically turned away from someplace that I wasn’t supposed to be. Fortunately, the guard who turned me away had a pass to the viewing site at the Canaveral Air Force Station.

There were a couple hundred people standing on the banks of an Indian River lagoon when I got there at about 3AM for a 5AM launch. A loudspeaker announcer assured us that he would wake everyone up about twenty minutes before launch, so I wrapped myself in a blanket and slept beside my car for a couple of hours.

I awoke to the Star-Spangled Banner at about 4:45 and migrated to the shore. The launch pad was a bit over a mile away: we could see the lights with the naked eye and Shuttle itself with binoculars. I was not, in other words, what you’d call close to the launch pad. But when those engines ignited a wall of sound came across the lagoon — it wasn’t the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, but it was, by far, the most powerful — like being hit by an ocean wave. It set me and all the other “launch virgins” back a step or two.

The sky was clear as a bell. I watched the boosters detached and the main-engine shut-off, too — though by that point, the Shuttle was just another star high above the horizon that winked out when the main engine shut off.

I got lost coming home…but that’s another story.

The camera I’d brought with me was nowhere near equal to the task of capturing the launch. You can see it better on television. But I took pictures anyway…I guess it was an item on my “bucket list.”