In April last year, a launch was scheduled after teaching duties were over and before travel season started: the last launch of the space shuttle Endeavour, slated for April 29th. When prospects looked good, we booked a last minute flight & hotel to Orlando, and soon found ourselves at the Space View Park in Titusville. It’s still quite a distance from the launch pad, but it offers a direct, unobstructed view of the launch pad. After a long wait, the launch was scrubbed and we extended our stay with a few days hoping to have a new attempt in the following days. That didn’t happen, and so we had a few days to explore everything Kennedy’s Space Center (KSC) has to offer (awesome^2!). As soon as the shuttle’s external fuel tank was drained, it was safe to offer the Discover KSC tours again, which offer the closest views of the launch pad (1.8 miles I believe) that tourist money can buy. A fortunate consequence of the scrubbed launch was that we not only got to see the launch pad — Endeavour was still on it!
Two weeks later, things looked good again, and another last minute booking brought me back to Titusville on May 16 2011. That day, not only Endeavour commander Mark Kelly was having a beautiful day, The 8 year old in me was having a blast, watching the final launch of Endeavour with awe and joy. Even at that distance,it’s a most impressive sight — the shuttle outline being very clear, and the rocket going up much faster than I seemed to remember from televised launches. You really get a sense of the tremendous power involved in bringing such a massive machine to high speeds! Unfortunately, Endeavour disappeared into the cloud deck after about 15 seconds, and from then on, people in airplanes had a better look than we did. Her last goodbye that day was the shadow of the exhaust plume that the early morning Sun cast on the low cloud deck. But we would meet again soon. Two weeks later, in the early morning hours of May 31st (while tweaking my talk), I saw her again from my hotel room in Toledo, Spain, silently crossing the sky only a few degrees apart from the ISS, less than a day after undocking.
On launch day, I rewarded the 8 year old’s patience with a 60cm cast model of the shuttle Endeavour (ok, you’re right, so I also got a smaller model as well and posters and calendars and whatnot, what’s the big deal?). It’s in my home office, and you would not believe how much joy a grown up (?) can still have from just watching a model of a pretty spacecraft at the start of each working day.
When the shuttle fleet retired, I thought that that would be the end of our story, but this week, there was a nice and surprising little epilogue. The space shuttle Discovery will be replacing the Enterprise in the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. As you may have heard in the news, Discovery was flown from KSC to Washington D.C. on Tuesday, and today (Thursday), Discovery was welcomed into the museum with a big ceremony. By some cosmic coincidence, I happened to fly into Washington Dulles on Wednesday. I was wondering whether I’d be able to catch a glimpse of Discovery. Sure enough, there she was, stacked on top of the shuttle carrier just a few hundred meters to my left as we reached the gate. And although I was in the right terminal for my connecting flight, I quickly decided to take the airport shuttle to a different terminal and back, since the airport shuttle’s route brought it much closer to Discovery’s temporary parking spot. And in case there was any doubt, the 8 year old in me is still alive and kicking (and excited, satisfied and happy). After more than 30 years, I’m still as much in love with space and the shuttle as I was back then.
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