Kennedy Space Center is in the middle of a nature preserve, so it’s teeming with wildlife. We’ve seen gators, raptors, vultures, bald eagles, turtles, and a crazy assortment of long-legged shore birds.

Back in the early 1960s when I was at the Cape (yeah, it was “The Cape” then) working on Polaris, it was also full of snakes of various and sundry persuasions, including a lot of rattlesnakes. It made walking between buildings interesting sometimes. With all the launch failures in the early stages of the Polaris program, we took to calling the A1 Polaris the ’snake killer,’ because every destruct by the range safety officer a few seconds after launch blew chunks of burning solid rocket fuel around the place and burned off a few acres. I still can’t figure out how we managed to avoid dropping pieces of it on Cocoa Beach.

The sound was truly awesome at that first launch at that close viewing site. The sound quickly increased to a point that your hearing seemed overloaded, and all you could hear was an overwhelming static or crackling sound. I remeber looking down at my shorts and seeing them vibrating. I could feel pressure inside my body, and it felt like my internal organs where shaking. Some people felt a bit quesy. It was really, really awesome. I went through a 36 exposure roll of film with my father’s Olympus OM-2, without an autowinder, by about the time the shuttle cleared the tower.

But, I just watched this current launch on Monday from the Visitor’s Center, much further away, and the sound was rather disappointing compared to that first launch back in 1981.

Some time I’ll have to show you the notes I took at the HST launch in 1990 – very similar! Everyone so hyped the noise that I really wasn’t so impressed by it – but the brilliant golden light from the solids was a complete surprise! Likewise, you see the steam heated up by the mains as the first sign that something’s going on, but from the distance and with sound travel time, it’s pretty subtle. Mainly though, one is impressed by the power. When people whine about the Hubble and other NASA enterprises, it’s worth remembering the seven astronauts riding in the center of that explosive maelstrom so you can write your ApJ papers.

Brilliant! ! (post style and topic).
Thanks,

Claire

I’ll do another report when I get back into town — today I got to go on a semi-private tour of Kennedy. Got to see the Mercury and Gemini launch sites, the Vehicle Assembly Building, part of the Ares 1-X rocket that they’re testing out in August, the launch pad for Atlantis, and the pad for Endeavor (still on the pad, as backup for a potential rescue mission). Lots of pics, but no way to download them at the moment.

As far as human spaceflight — this is a long discussion, but briefly, one more opinion: though we *will* get off this planet eventually, colonize the Moon, ultimately probably terraform Mars, and eventually get beyond, i have come to feel that generally, i just don’t think the tradeoff at *this time* is very worth it.

I would *much* rather have a bunch of very cost-effective unmanned probes go forth and tell us if there are any actual oceans under Europa’s crust, any microbes on Titan than a few more incredibly expensive glitzy spaceshots of humans walking around the Space Station while getting very little actual science done etc. i think the emotional impact of the distant probe missions is very palpable as well.

Problems with constellation, IMO, are normal for developing a new spacecraft (something about the difficulty of rocket science in general). Cost and schedule issues are pretty typical for this sort of thing, partially because of overly optimistic/political scheduling, and partially because of going the first several years unfunded (bush layed out his “vision” and never coughed up the cash to make it happen. NASA had to clip other programs to do it, which of course is not exactly the commitment level I’d prefer).