Last I said anything we were sitting on the bus waiting to go to the causeway. Our lunatic showed up with several additions in tow. However, the 36 hour bender was taking it’s toll and she was tolerable. The drive out was nice. We got the pro-forma warning about how launches are risky and we could be pelted by debris and toxic fire from the sky if things went pear-shaped. Then we got out there, drove past the grandstand with the countdown clock, parked, got out and staked our little claim.
At the causeway you’re about six miles from the Shuttle. It looks tiny off in the distance but it was clear enough that we could make out features unaided. The binoculars I bought for the last trip turned out to be really nice to use. They have a little more eye relief than I would normally want but that works really well when you just mash them up against your sunglasses. There was a lot of milling about and chatter and general, good-natured disorder. A lot of families some of them with really young kids. Really though, there were just a whole lot of people there all around. I don’t know what the final count was but it was high. I know that our tour guide said that there were 96 buses going and if each holds 50 passengers that’s almost 5000 just in our area and that doesn’t include VIPs, family, staff, etc.
I walked down to the countdown clock and Wes took my picture with it. There are a few built-in holds in the countdown at various times. We got there in the middle of the hold at -00:20:00 and waited until it started ticking again. The problem that they were dealing with during this hold was that one of the heat tiles had been partially pulled away from the crew hatch when the access arm was pulled away from the orbiter. They ended up pushing it back and then smearing the super-high temperature equivalent of JB Weld on it. There is a much longer hold at -00:09:00 during which the Flight Director asks the ‘go / no-go’ question from each of the various departments. He got down to the Range Safety Officer and that guy’s computer wasn’t working right so he was ‘no-go’. They decided to go ahead and let the countdown continue and hold again at -00:05:00 to give them time to fix the computer problem. They ended up eating into most of the launch window time during that hold and got the final ‘go’ about two seconds before they would have had to scrub the launch. So, with that going the Shuttle crosses into internal power and computer control and then off it goes.
It makes a big cloud when it all ignites and you can’t really even see it until it clears the tower. I managed to get one decent picture as it was going up. There are a few others but they’re so-so and honestly I was watching through the binoculars most of the time. It only takes about two minutes to get so far away you can’t really see it except for that the top of the column of exhaust is a little bit bright. It was just visible through the binoculars when the SRBs detached and after that the light from the main engines was too faint to follow it anymore.
So that’s it. A very workman like description of the last launch of Discovery. I can’t really articulate how it felt to be there. It was genuinely moving. I’m glad I came and I know I will probably not ever see anything like it again. It’s really a transcendent kind of experience. You’re watching this thing go up and it’s bright and then loud and somehow seems to be moving very slowly, like it shouldn’t be hanging in the sky like that but it’s also over so quickly. And you stand there and see it and know what’s going on but still can’t help but feel all this, I don’t know. Pride? Not just in the program or this country but what we can do as a people. It seems like more than that though. Exultant.
