A routine trip to the grocery store a mile away ... and there are one-hundred thousand people clogging my tiny coastal town.
They line the streets, they stand in the parking lots of every business and shop, vehicles are at a virtual standstill on the highways. For a ten mile stretch on US 1 there are tents, RVs, vans, children playing and frolicking, adults sitting in camp chairs talking and playing cards, sipping lemonade.
These are not the premium seats, but the show from here is spectacular nonetheless. These working families, many who dedicated their paltry two weeks of vacation to witness the crucible of discovery, will soon rise to their feet, put down the cards, sandwiches, and glasses. They will wait quietly, at times nervously, with fingers crossed; many heads will be bowed in prayer. With binoculars in hand the adults motion to the kids, even the smallest children sense something is going on. From the aged to the toddler, they strain both ears and eyes at the sliver of green painted on the horizon across the tranquil deep-blue bay ... it is time.
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This diary will be updated live from my vantage here on the Space Coast with any developments. Right now the weather is looking pretty dicey.)
Update 1:34 PM EST: Launch scrubbed
Update 12:35 PM EST: Crew is settling into cabin now. Weather is still questionable. We've had some light sprinkles and thunder peals here.
A fat arrow of fire with a head of glistening white suddenly leaps off the horizon and rises into the blue sky framed by distant thunderheads. From my porch I see her burst above the nearby treetops and reach hungrily for the sky on a pillar of smoke in eerie silence: Space Shuttle Discovery will be on the ascent, and I have a front row view from my porch. It's no accident that the local area code is 3 ... 2 ... 1.
I didn't take these pics, but they give you some idea what the STS looks like as seen from my neighborhood
That pic looks like it was taken facing east, standing across US 1 from somewhere north of the Publix Grocery store in South Titusville/Port St John. From my yard it looks exactly like this except you can't see the colossal VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building) to the right and the pad itself unless you get on the roof. Imagine a line of trees and modest suburban homes cutting off the bottom of the pic, and that's what it looks like from DarkSyde Manor.
I live a few miles west of Kennedy Space Center, home to launchpad 39-B. There a few decades ago the mighty Saturn V hurled a tiny capsule called Apollo 11, carrying a spidery excursion module known as the Eagle LEM, to the sky and into history. Those Saturn launches must have been a sight to behold considering how grand the relatively small STS package is.
From DarkSyde Manor the sound delay is about 30 to 40 seconds. It starts as distant bass rumble barely audible, almost below the low end of human hearing; it grows to a solid dull roar punctuated with pops and crackles; the ground vibrates, the trees softly shake, dishes sitting in my cupboards began to rattle, our dog howls, the frame of my home gently resonates in and out of phase with the deep harmonics pervading every scrap of air. Closer up, from a mile away it reaches into your chest and rattles your heart and lungs.
A couple more pics giving an idea of what it looks like from my porch.
Space travel is a risky business. The Space Shuttle Transport System or STS is arguably the most complex machine ever built by man. Imagine millions of parts, hundreds of hydraulic lines and mechanical pumps, sensitive electronics, miles and miles of wiring and hundreds of square feet of circuit boards, gigantic tanks of pure oxygen just begging to be set afire, all held together by thousands of welded joints, hundreds of thousands of bolts and screws, and glue. Now add hundreds of tons of high explosives. That's just the Orbiter and the main tank. Bolt that winged vehicle onto two massive, solid fuel rockets, the largest ever flown. Now take the entire stack and violently shake the shit out of it for several minutes as if it were sitting in the midst of a major earthquake ... while ripping a hole through the air ten times faster than an F-15 on full afterburner.
If that goes well, the occupants find themselves utterly dependent on a bubble of heated air enclosed in a paper thin skin of metal and plastic. A breach the size of a postage stamp can kill them. Outside of that artificial cocoon is an environment of hard vacuum, sleeting solar radiation, and temperatures varying between 150 below and 300 above on each circuit around the earth. The stress from differential thermal expansion and contraction on the various materials making up the Orbiter this produces is immense, and those tolerances must be built in while still retaining the structural integrity of a Swiss watch and the strength of a battle tank.
But wait, that's only half of it. You still have reentry to survive. Take that same device, subject it to more buffeting than an offroad racing truck, 5 G's, and blast the exterior with incandescent jets of superheated plasma in the 10,000 degree range, while it's flying!
The first reentry I heard was in the dead of night. The KA-BOOM! almost knocked me out of bed and left me confused, about to call 9-11 to report the nearby Power Station must have gone up when I realized what it was: Routine Reentry. Until I hear that crashing double sonic boom echoing off the wetlands and cloud tops, and/or glimpse a silver-white aerodynamic triangle gliding sleekly overhead followed by touchdown and roll out, it ain't over.
And that's part of why it's all so dangerous. That it can be done at all is a miracle of technology and a testament to the engineering, manufacturing, and maintenance skill of thousands of people all over the world stretching back to the legendary Werner von Braun and Robert Goddard. I'm proud to say that Mrs. DarkSyde, some members of her family, and a number of my neighbors, directly contribute to these Missions. They are professionals of the highest caliber.
Much of the grandeur is lost in the narrow angle perspective of the camera lens above. When viewing it for real you can watch as the STS rises tens of thousands of feet, tracing out a grand path stretching across most of your vertical field of vision connecting the earth to the sky. Shortly after liftoff, when the STS is several handspans above the horizon, she tips away and arcs over the Atlantic Ocean, racing now at ten thousand miles per hour and accelerating at 3 G's. If conditions allow, with a set of cheap binoculars you can sometimes make out two tiny pinpricks pull away from the main firehead trailing razor fine lines of smoke. The SRB's have separated. You can see the main engine still firing, a distant point of light at the end of a long sinuous snake of gray-white smoke, as the Shuttle Orbiter achieves apogee and inserts into low earth orbit.
As incredible as the event is to witness in person, at night it is simply ineffable. This image doesn't even come close. You have to see it to believe anything could be so beautiful and so exciting! It lights the horizon and half the sky in brilliance, as if an atomic bomb went off, and the exhaust gas is so bright it hurts your eyes. You can easily read by it from several miles away. The light scatters much like sunlight and actually turns the eastern sky a dark blue! The tongue of flame casts moving shadows on the ground from every tree, person, and house, and throws shifting spectres upward playing through the clouds with the power of a rapidly rising yellow-red sun.
Click here to learn more about NASA's Return to Flight Mission.
Be it day or night if you're a scientist or a space buff, this is like Mecca. I heartily recommend you make a pilgrimage at some point in your life to enjoy it!