Actually I can think of lots of perfect world fantasies :

sitting in a bar being surrounded by beautiful, admiring women having had my SF ideas turned into the first FTL drive ever .. & me laying back there at that bar with Coopers pales on tap watching as they get back the first pictures from Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri and Barnard ’s Star and hearing on the news that the Palestinean state just welcomed the visit of US President Al Gore and that “coming up in sport later, quintuple F1 champion Ayrton Senna just won the Grand Prix in Adelaide and Australia crushed India at the cricket ..”and ..

Well I could go on like that all day but I won’t …

I’ll just add that my “perfect world” would include me watching the launch of the Shuttle – or better yet the first human mission to Mars.

Svetlio : Thanks for your reply. It is a worry about what will happen when the Space Shuttle goes. My hope is that some other government actually purchases a ‘used shuttle’ and uses it to do the job. Prob’ly very unrealistic of me but, hey, we can dream …

It will be a sad day when the shuttles stop flying and even sadder if they’re not (yet?) replaced by something better.

Well, yeah, every fantasy has it’s flaws. If it were a perfect world, we’d all get to choose between a bowl of gold star chili, or some turkey and mashed potatoes, and we’d be getting massages.

*sigh*

To the above: as far as the usefulness of space station, there have been a number of good things to come out of it, and frankly nasa gets a rap for being much more expensive than it actually is. The whole organization is a fraction of a percent of the national budget, and furthermore is the national -aeronautics- and space administration, meaning it does a great deal more than just space stuff. On top of that, KSC alone is one of florida’s great weather centers (side effect of all the monitoring that must be done for launching spacecraft)(and in a place where weather information can mean life and death, IE hurricanes), and of course is a very unique wildlife preserve.

You might not always agree with the specific projects (even I certainly don’t in a few cases), but the body of work to come out of space exploration has been very beneficial to mankind.

While I don’t recall feeling the ground shake before the soundwave hit, I do recall feeling the roar hit my chest. Your whole body feels the low-frequency waves so much more than your ears hear the audible range of the noise. I can’t imagine what a Saturn V felt like.

Also, don’t forget to take your eyes away from your camera’s viewfinder on occasion, to watch it directly.

While I’m old enough, I’m from New York, and I never did see an Apollo launch in person.

But all other arguments aside. SEE ONE BEFORE YOU DIE! And bring the kids. It is a most amazing experience.

I went back in the day where we could park proly closer than you can now, but proly doesn’t matter. The ground shakes before the wall of sound hits you.
Read that again, you can literally hear the roar of the rocket in your bones, through your feet, before the sound waves propagate through the air.
There is no rational reaction. Just ‘OMFG! A f-ing skyscraper is floating in the f-ing air on a GD pillar of f-ing fire! And it’s LOUD as s*!’ Rock concerts aren’t even near the same order of magnitude. Seeing it on TV is nothing compared to the real thing.

Of course, then (hopefully) the understanding kicks in..once you get your hearing back..and it’s even cooler! Unless you’ve seen it in person, it’s really hard to truly understand what it takes to ‘break the bonds of Earth’.

I’m not completely against a station in LEO. A Mir-sized or Skylab-sized station is OK. Structural components can be launched by Atlas 5/Proton class rockets. Such a station can serve as a spaceport to the Moon and Mars (if it’s in a proper orbit, the ISS is not).
As far as I remember Mir has some nice instruments aboard Kvant 1/2 modules and it served as an astronomy base, but I never heard about impressive scientific findings like these of HST (correct me if I’m wrong).
I’m not sure how Russia/Japan/ESA are going to support ISS after 2010, they don’t have the ability to launch critical components which can only be launched by the Space Shuttle.

Regards,
Sve