Time for another roadtrip to see a space shuttle launch! Sadly this will almost certainly be my last shuttle launch. There are only two more planned launches -- Endeavour's STS-133 mission in September (or a little later) and Discovery's STS-134 mission in November (or a lot later). The insider consensus is that they are going to add one more flight to the plan in 2011, likely June or so, but then that will really be it. This shutdown of the shuttle program was decided in 2004 as part of the Bush administrations "Vision for Space Exploration" (VSE) that would take NASA to Mars. Per that plan, they started shutting down factory assembly lines and laying off workers two years ago, so that horse has clearly left the barn.
My day job as an engineer in the TV news business gives me the possibility of extremely good access to NASA TV feeds and Kennedy Space Center itself. So, anticipating the end of the shuttle program, a couple years ago I started getting serious about trying to see a space shuttle launch. I also considered that, living in Atlanta, I'm within reasonable driving distance (8 hours drive) of KSC, and I don't know that I'm going to live in Atlanta forever, so that was another reason to go ahead and do this while I could.
We went down in December 2007 to see one but they ran into problems so that trip was a bust. I drove down again in March 2009 and did successfully see a launch. I decided to go to one more over the 2009-2010 winter, but my schedule didn't allow for it until now. As you get in late spring and summer, you start seeing the launches get scrubbed due to weather (thunderstorms popping up) so I did want to get this last trip in before the frustration of summer launch scrubs. Plus as we get closer to the very end of the shuttle program, frankly all of the crazy procrastinating half-assed fans come out of the woodwork, and it's only going to get harder and harder to get close for a launch. Meaning that the hotels will be booked up for 100 miles around, traffic gridlock for a whole day before and after, and a generally unpleasant experience. All things that I will happily avoid.
So, off we go!
Wednesday May 12th, L-2 Day
I hit the road around noon, which would still get me to Cocoa Beach by 8pm or so. For weeks I've been stashing stuff in the mp3 player (my cell phone) for this drive, beyond my usual weekly fare of WREK radio shows from their mp3 archive. First, there's a new show called Fonotopia , produced at WYPR in Baltimore, that digs into archives of ooooold 78 RPM records -- music from all over the planet, from the 1930s and earlier. Second, WREK has a science discussion show called Inside The Black Box hosted by a couple live-wire professors. I normally can't find the time to keep up with it weekly but try to catch a couple episodes now and then, and they didn't disappoint; both the piezoelectricity and biomaterials shows were completely fascinating and entertaining, notwithstanding one of the hosts' annoying penchant for interrupting. Finally, I had a few live concerts from WebInFront cued up: an effortlessly beautiful 2-hour performance by Radiohead, an uninspired gig by Dinosaur Jr. circa 1994 when they'd signed to a major label and weren't having that much fun anymore, and a Big Star show that I didn't get to but will soon.
Thursday May 13th, L-1 Day
Launch wasn't going to be until Friday, but I've learned from previous trips that I need to get there and onsite at KSC early on the day before a launch because they will have some unique things planned for the media, like a tour of some facility that is otherwise off limits to the public. But you have to get there first thing in the morning and check out the signup sheets. Which I did, and found that they were offering a tour of the SLSL building;
kind of a letdown (the ultimate would be the VAB or an OPF) but I'll take it. So I signed up and then had a couple hours to kill before it started.
I sat in on the L-1 briefing, which is the briefing one day prior to launch where a handful of managers have one last sitdown in front of the cameras to tell the world (via NASA TV) what's up with the launch. What's the progress of the countdown (which is actually 70 hours long), what's the weather outlook, and to answer whatever the media are interested in asking about. It's always a thrill for me to sit in that briefing room, the same room that I've seen in hundreds of briefings on NASA TV. It looks good enough on TV but is actually rather drab and shopworn. NASA doesn't get a lot of funding (surprised?) but the recent Obama budget does plow a bunch of money into modernizing KSC so hopefully that will improve.
The briefing wrapped up and I killed some more time, and then got ready to go on the SLSL tour. Bastards left early. No tour. Bah!
Instead, though, they announced that they were going to do a space suit demo. The main media center at KSC is a big old building with a large central room where reporters can sit at rows of counters to do their writing,
and up front are various NASA representatives available to answer any question, and all around are various TVs showing the NASA TV feeds. So in a modest area up front, they had a space suit expert who had brought in a suit and was dressing up some poor young lady from public affairs staff in it and explaining the parts as he went along. This wasn't the big white suit they use for spacewalks, rather the orange "launch and entry" suit that the astronauts wear when inside the space shuttle during the hazardous phases at the very beginning and end of each mission. Pressurized air, coolant loops, helmet with visors, and even an emergency life raft and oxygen.
After that, I grabbed a quick bite to eat at the cafeteria (the same one the workers use, another thrill) and then had a couple hours to kill until the next event. So I did a test setup of my telescope in the parking lot. I'd brought a telescope with me in March 2009, but this time I was bringing the fancier new one. I hadn't actually used it in a couple months, and just threw it in the car for the drive down, so I needed to give it a full test before things got busy on launch day.
I spent two hours swing it around, looking at the launch pad, osprey nests, airliners high overhead, vultures circling over the VAB, etc. It all looked like it was working and I packed it back up into the car. I had my head down looking in the eyepiece most of the time and laterfound that I hadn't put sunscreen on my neck and now had a wicked sunburned "red neck".
The final event of the day was another media tour, but this time it was going to be for the money shot: a trip out to the launch pad to see RSS rollback (click to see what that's about, I won't bother explaining it here). This was an extremely rare opportunity to get close to the launchpad and see Atlantis nearly ready to launch. Lighting was perfect and so the 100 or so of us there (hauled over in busses) set up out tripods and clicked away while the structure slowly opened the clamshell to reveal Atlantis.
I signed up for the next morning's junket and headed back to the hotel for an early night's sleep.
Friday May 14th, Launch Day
Got to KSC right on time and got in line for the busses. These were going to take us over to the Operations and Checkout ("O and C") building, where we'd be able to see the astronauts get into the Astrovan to head out to the launch pad. This is a common shot that you see in the evening news highlights all the time and there's always a hundred photogs there getting the shot. Well, you're getting pretty deep into the belly of the beast at that point so they do a thorough security screening: they make you line up all your bags and gear and then step back a good
20 feet while they let the dogs go down the line sniffing for ... weapons, I guess, although they'd probably not be too happy to find dope either.
Anyway, no terrorists were found and we headed over the O+C building, where everyone set up and started jockeying for position. Once the Huey helicopter started circling overhead we knew it wouldn't be much longer. The astronauts came out, lined up in front of the Astrovan grinning and waving while the crowd hollered, and then they got into the Astrovan to head out to the pad.
And now it was crunch time for me. I need to get my telescope set up, camera and tripod set up, radio scanner set up, and generally get everything checked out and ready to go.
At one point my work colleagues interviewed NASA VIP Bobby Braun, and then just prior to launch astronaut Dave Wolf showed up to do on-air commentary with our reporter.
Launch itself is quick. We're 3 miles away from the launchpad, so you see the rockets start up in silence, and a few seconds after liftoff the rumble finally reaches you. The shuttle climbs quickly off the launchpad and accelerates pretty much straight up (from our vantage point pretty close in), then gradually bends over and heads away over the Atlantic. The exciting noisy part is really over within about 30 seconds, and then you're either watching a small dot race away, or watching in binoculars, or watching on NASA TV.
I'd brought my telescope in an attempt to track it on the way up. Tracking an object manually with a telescope (even a nice motorized model like the one I bought last year) is terribly difficult, because once you lose the object it's very hard to get it back in view. Use of a finders scope (typically mounted on the side of the main telescope) is absolutely critical. I have one, that projects a virtual dot on the sky using an LED and a special lens, however I had made the unfortunate mistake of leaving the thing switched on. So at the moment of truth, 2:20pm, when I went to use it to track the shuttle racing up through the sky, the battery in the finder scope was dead. Damn it. I tried for a few seconds to catch it with the telescope and then gave up and just watched the launch with naked eyes.
Two minutes after launch, the SRBs separated, and the shuttle continued rocketing up to orbit on its own three main engines. After about 4 minutes I was able to pick it up again with my telescope, and I was able to track it all the way out until it was lost in the haze of the horizon, nearly all the way to MECO at T+8m30s.
And that was it! My coworkers didn't have any more on-camera appearances to do so they rapidly started tearing down their set and packing it up into the truck. Apparently they were more interested in their Friday night plans back home than soaking up the ambience like me! I packed up my gear into the car and started to head out.
So there I was heading out of the parking lot, and sitting in traffic behind a few cars at a stop sign. Traffic was also stopped in the other direction. I lazily looked over to the left at the car next to me, going the other way, and I see Mike Moses in the driver's seat. Huh, Mike Moses, neat. Holy shit, Mike Moses! He's going to the briefing! I forgot about the briefing!
Spun the car around and headed back in and got into the briefing room just in time to catch the briefing :)
This time, being a post-launch briefing, all the usual management rock stars were there: the aforementioned Mike Moses, his boss Bill Gerstenmaier, KSC ops guy Mike Leinbach, and Russian space agency VIP Alexey Krasnov (the shuttle was carrying up a Russian addition to the station). The Russian guy was pretty interesting, as he tended to go off script more than the NASA guys. And it's always fun to watch Mike Moses nodding off when he's not on camera -- he's paying attention, but he does let his eyes roll up and his eyelids droop.
Finally, after the briefing I said one last goodbye to KSC and headed out to plow through miles of traffic back to Cocoa Beach. This would probably be the last time in shuttle era and possibly last time ever that I personally would be at KSC to see a launch. I do expect to be back here some day with my nieces (gotta get them exposed to some science and engineering, right?) but otherwise that's it for me.
As I drove past Port Canaveral, I stopped by the Canaveral Locks, where the SRBs would be getting towed in a couple days after launch. After separating from the shuttle two minutes into flight, they fall down to the ocean under parachutes and are then intercepted by two medium-sized ships (called Freedom Star and Libery Star) who then tow the SRBs back to Kennedy to begin the refurb process. I was hoping they'd get towed in, through these locks, before I left on Sunday morning. Unfortunately they didn't make it in until Sunday night.
Saturday May 15th
Finally it was time to relax a little. I went to the KSC Visitors Center, which is essentially a NASA theme park. They do have two IMAX theaters and so I saw a screening of Hubble 3D and a screening of Magnificent Desolation.
The Hubble movie I'd seen already (via long drive down to Columbus!) but wanted to see again just to catch more detail; it's actually not that great of a production in my opinion, but I've been spoiled by watching the May 2009 STS-125 mission progress live at work and also the daily highlights in HD. But the other movie, Magnificent Desolation, is fantastic! (tagline: "Only 12 men have walked on the moon. You're next.") The general idea is to reintroduce young audiences to what exactly Apollo was, and so what they did was incorporate actual lunar surface footage with really stunning simulations of the lunar surface. In IMAX it is truly breathtaking. Go see this if you can!
I took a ride in the Shuttle Launch Experience, which is a kind of just a silly ride but entertaining nonetheless. Visited the rocket garden, and got a panoramic photo of the field where the crowd was watching launch just one day prior. They actually can't see the launch pad from here, due to the trees, but
once the shuttle clears the treeline they get a good enough view and certainly get the sound.
On the way back to the hotel, I checked out Jetty Park, which is another vantage point from which one can see the SRBs being towed in.
There are cruise ships heading in and out of Port Canaveral all day long, and an unbelievable number of people all hanging out on the jetty and the beach nearby, apparently just enjoying the sun. It was actually crowded (and noisy) to the point of being claustrophobic, probably because it's a free beach with easy access. Avoid Jetty Park.
Sunday May 16th
Leaving Florida and heading back home, I decided to drive north through Canaveral National Seashore. Just north of KSC is Playalinda Beach, a nice remote location that has a good view of the launchpads from the north. This is also the playground for the astronauts as they are getting ready to launch.
Drove past a large radome that apparently was "Beacon 42" but I have no idea what that is, probably a navigation aid.
Here's an excellent long form piece in Washington Monthly about the current struggle over NASA's long term plans. The author is a little toe quick to dismiss the value of micro-gravity science, but otherwise it's a great overview of the issues.
Epilogue: Atlantis returned to Earth on May 26th with an ontime landing back at Kennedy Space Center. At the post-landing news briefing, reporters were asking the panel about their thoughts on the approaching end to the shuttle program, and Gerst had some very nice words about his time with the team:
"We are tremendously blessed to get to do what we get to go do. All of us up here, this as much of a passion for us as it is a profession. We all want more, but I look at what we've got, and I am very thankful for what we have. I'm thankful to work with this team; I can't think of any individuals I would rather spend my hours with than the folks I work with [nods to panel] in this business. There are no more sounder professionals in the world. We'll take what we're given and we will implement the absolute best program that we can implement with what we're given."
Godspeed.