Go Discovery... GO!!!!!!

(yes, that's my pic, and yes, that's really what it looked like...)

Well, I can’t exactly hold you in suspense here, it’s pretty much front-page news around the planet that the big D blasted off in an absolutely picture perfect example of how it’s done yesterday at 4:53 pm.
What many headline readers will NOT catch, however, is that she almost didn’t. Through no fault of her own, either. More on that later.
Launch day for me started with the debate on when to go. My entry ticket specified I could not get in any earlier than 9:30 am, but my car pass stated that I couldn’t arrive any later than 12:30 pm. Much as I love KSC, I really didn’t want to spend 10 hours there in the baking sun, especially with nothing other than my $9 Walmart camping chair for accommodations. So the game became: how late could I depart and still make my entry window?
Rumours from the KSC staff and many locals were that the roads start clogging around here before sunrise on launch day, so I would have to consider this carefully. In the end I decided on leaving at 11:00 should work; hopefully the early birds would all be gone, and if not I still had an hour and a half to make what is normally a twenty minute drive.
The drive took, believe it or not, exactly twenty minutes. I never stopped the whole way.
This was but for the grace of God, because from my vantage point it appeared that the only roads in the entire county that hadn’t come to a screeching halt were exactly the ones I needed to get to KSC. Thankfully only one major road, the 528, was essential to get me over to the nearly secret back road entry on hwy 3. 528 is one of two main east-west causeways that bring traffic into the Cape and Cocoa beach, and the east bound lanes coming in were not only full, they had pretty much stopped. But the westbound side was free, and amazingly only but a handful of cars were getting off to go up the 3.
A few miles back from the space center I came upon a roadblock with two lanes. The left one was pretty backed up with guards explaining to folks that they couldn’t go any further, so I tried the right. I didn’t even have to stop, as soon as I pulled out my magic blue placard I was waved right through.
Nice.
(Note: This truly defies explanation, I really had a horseshoe lodged somewhere. Later reports from NASA stated the crowds around the Cape that day were some of the biggest they’d seen. EVER. Consider that some of the Apollo launches would pull in 1 million people, and you get the idea.)
And I just kept going, right on into the KSC visitor’s center parking lot. I even managed – don’t ask how – to bag a spot four rows back from the entrance. All the more incredible when you consider that there were at least 10,000 cars there already, and more on the way.
I then expected massive lineups at the entrance, but again was pleasantly surprised.
The gate operations for this were something on a scale I’d never seen there. Rather than using the usual five or six metal detectors inside, they had banks of them spread the entire width of the front entrance area outside with an army of guards for the bag searches. I actually got in quicker than my visit at Christmas. They should send the KSC security people out on tour to the airports to show them how it’s done.
Once through and back outside amongst the various buildings, though, it was a world gone mad.
There were thousands and thousands and thousands of people everywhere you looked. Lined up for buses. Lined up for food. Lined up for… I didn’t know, because I couldn’t see where the front of some lines went.
My main job at this point was to stake out a spot. I continued on out to the far reaches of the yard, starting at the rocket garden and working my way east. I came upon a huge clearing with bleachers, speakers and a big screen showing a live feed from the launch pad, so I set up shop. Looking around for a while, I realized that there were still a lot of buildings and trees obscuring the skyline in the direction of the pad, so I headed off further east to see what else were available. Finally, at the far end of the center, I found the “front lawn viewing area”. This is literally the last little piece of open grass in the north east corner of the property, and therefore is technically the closest you can get to the launch pad here. OK, I realize that an extra 1500 – 2000 feet at this point is a bit moot, but hey, why not. The other bonus is that, other than the KSC sign at the corner, the horizon is clear all the way to the tree line on the other side of the highway out front. And they also had the PA and big screen setup here as well. But even five hours before the launch, the place was nearly full. I carefully picked my way to the front corner, and as I looked around for a place to land an older gentlemen piped up… “The lady that was just sitting here in front of us has left, you’re welcome to grab her spot!”.
Awesome!
I was now front and center for the Greatest Show on Earth.
I spent the afternoon chatting with my new neighbors, a retired teacher by the name by the name of Larry along with his wife, son and daughter-in-law, who turned out to be very cool folks.
The family was originally from Iowa, and Larry and his wife now lived in Florida most of the year.
Even more than me, Larry was REALLY hoping Discovery was going to go today. Although he had seen launches from afar at his home in Ocala, none of them had seen one up close, so with the clock ticking to the end of the program he decided this would be it. However he was already out a considerable sum to fly his son and daughter-in-law down not once, but twice, as they had come down before for the earlier date that got scrubbed. So he was understandably most distraught at the idea of having to shell out for a third time.
Although it was scorching hot, the time went by pretty quickly. We got to follow along as the astronauts were suited up and all the systems were prepped, with Launch Control talking us through it all the way.
I had thought the area we were in pretty full when I arrived, but it was nothing compared to what it looked like by 4:00 pm. There litterally wasn’t an extra square inch to be had, as I looked back it was a sea of bodies all the way to the horizon.

With thirty minutes to go on the clock, things started to get tense.
Although Discovery’s systems were all A-OK, a problem cropped up the Range Control central computer. This meant that the Air Force command post that oversees all the tracking cameras for the shuttle and security was blind. And those cameras must be 100% operational in order for a launch to get the green light. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the most important is the need for Mission Control to be able to closely watch the condition of the SRB’s and the external fuel tank in case something goes wrong, as when a large piece of foam detached from the tank in 2003 and fatally damaged Columbia when she tried to re-enter days later.
Twenty minutes go by, still no go.
The angst is becoming palpable.
Launch Control now tells us that they will add a five minute hold to the count at T-minus 5:00.
But that’s all they can do, once past that the launch window to meet the space station closes, and if they can’t sort the cameras out by then the launch will be scrubbed.
Ten minutes to go. Still no Range computer.
T-minus 5 minutes. The hold begins.
3 minutes left. No word.
2 minutes left. Still negative.
1 minute left. ..
No range computer.
The place goes silent.
We’re all holding our breath.
With less than ten seconds of hold remaining (I swear I am not making that up) the radio crackles… it’s the Range Control Officer.
“We are go on Range!”
The crowd doesn’t go wild, they go absolutely apeshit.
The count resumes.
All the umbilicals begin to retract.
At T-minus 1:00 the orbiter goes to internal power.
Next stop, T-minus 0:31.
This is one of the most critical moments, as this is where the shuttle takes over 100% control of her own thought processes, and her four main computers have to look at what’s going on and decide within fractions of a second if they all agree everything is good. This doesn’t always happen, in fact it’s the exact reason the night launch I waited to see in 1990 got scrubbed.
The clock counts down. Everyone is now standing on their toes…
“T-minus 30 seconds, Discovery’s computers in agreement, go for launch!”
The crowd roars again.
“10, 9, 8… go for main engine start”
Sparks fly from the igniters and a brilliant flash lights up the big screen as Discovery’s three main engines blast to life. In this instant, they start consuming fuel at a rate that would drain the average swimming pool in about 25 seconds.
“5, 4, 3, 2, 1…”

And then, as Marvin the Martian would say,

KABOOOOOM

When the shuttle’s SRBs light, there’s no turning back.
Being made up of solid fuel, they are in essence the world’s largest fireworks. Once on, you can’t shut them off, you can’t even slow them down. They’re going to go wherever they’re pointed, taking with them whatever they’re attached to.
And they’re going go there in a hurry.
Luckily the three main engines on the orbiter are pretty powerful in their own right, and since they can be steered, they are very effective at keeping the whole package on track.
Although the forests across the road block our direct view of the launch, it takes only about five or six seconds for something to appear.
And there was no mistaking what it was.
A huge group gasp was heard as it suddenly lit up the sky over the trees, the fiery blast from each SRB clearly visible.
I thought they’d be bright up this close, but nothing like this…

I had taken my sunglasses of so that I could work both my cameras, but in that instant I realized this was a big mistake. It was like gazing into a welding torch.
For a few seconds I just stared painfully in awe, and then realized I had to get pictures!
I raised the camera and snapped away, trying to balance taking in what I was seeing “live” with looking through the viewfinder to save something for posterity. Not easy.
Then the sound hit.
I have to say that element was just a bit disappointing. After the ferocious roar I’d experienced in ’89, I thought this would be even more intense. In fact it was just the opposite, at no point do I think it ever got more than about a half as loud as when I had watched it from across the intercoastal.
I suspect the reason for this is the terrain. When watching it with mostly water between your viewing location and the launch pad, there is very little to attenuate the sound. Anybody who’s ever had a conversation with someone in a boat halfway across a lake at their cottage will understand how dramatic this effect is. However, the visitors’ center at KSC is squarely in the middle of a forest, and trees are some of nature’s best natural sound suppressors, so I guess it makes sense.
Still, this was no jet streaking across the sky. Even if a little toned down, there was absolutely no mistaking the deep, crackling roar of that supersonic exhaust.
Supersonic?
Yep. The minute they’re lit up, the exhaust gases traveling out the back of the SRB’s reach about 6,000 mph (about 9,400 km/h) or around Mach 8, if you prefer. This is in large part why they sound like they’re tearing the fabric of the atmosphere apart.

Discovery was having an absolutely textbook flight. She rolled over on her back right on cue, and then once through the point of maximum atmospheric pressure got the go ahead to throttle up… and did. Perfectly.
I relaxed a little and now took a moment to just drink in the sight of the huge, beautiful white contrail streaking upwards.

Not a moment later, they called SRB separation, and sure enough you could actually see the two long white pillars peel away, flames fading out.

Then she was no more than a little yellow dot.

And that’s when it hit me.
This was it.
The last time I, or indeed many of the folks around me, would ever see this show.

The plan now is to go back to small scale commercial rockets to get the job done, so it may be a long, long time before we see something the size and might of the shuttle again.
So if you are so very fortunate as to be able to get down to the Cape in early April to see Endeavour off, I HIGHLY recommend you do.
One rarely, if ever, gets the chance to truly watch history in the making.
Especially on scale that, not long ago, only the gods could have imagined.

Godspeed Discovery

She is the grande dame of the fleet.
With more missions, more mileage and more “firsts” than any other spacecraft in history, orbiter OV-103, better known to us all as Discovery, will fly her last mission today.
And I will be there to see her off.
How could I not?
As you all know, I’m nothing if not a complete and total uber-geek when it comes to space stuff.
My deepest passion has always been the Mercury-to-Apollo years, when the technology was literally being invented faster than the materials and know-how could keep up, and every flight was a billion dollar sit-on-the-edge-of-your-seat gamble. 400,000 people pulled together as one, 24/7 for the better part of a decade, to pull off what many people then (and a few idiots still today) considered impossible, putting a man on the moon. Six times.
After such an incredible feat, NASA’s next act seemed on the surface a bit ho-hum.
Looked at pragmatically, the shuttle was really nothing more than a reusable space delivery truck.
It could only go into orbit and back and thus had none of the frontier romance of heading off to the moon or other planets.
But make no mistake… the shuttles are ANYTHING but ordinary.
30 years after their first flight, they still stand as the high water mark in machine engineering.
A few sobering facts…

Max Takeoff weight: 4,500,000 lbs (2,045,000 kgs)
Total thrust: 6,200,000+ lbs (equivalent to 44,000,000 hp)
Top speed: 17,440 mph (28,067 km/h) - Mach 25
Max altitude: 400 statute miles (643 km)
Max payload to low orbit: 63,500 lbs (28,803 kgs)
Total length of electrical wiring: 370 km
Number of pneumatic and hydraulic valves: 1,060
Number of circuit breakers: 1,440
Total number of parts: 2,500,000+

What we have here is a team of machines that can each blast the equivalent of two full tractor trailer loads of stuff all the way to orbit, stay there for weeks, and if necessary bring said amount of stuff BACK, withstanding temperatures of 3,000+ degrees F on the way down.
And do it over and over and over…
They are the most complex moving objects humans have ever created.
And Discovery is the undisputed queen bee.
Her record speaks for itself:

Most space flights – 39
Most miles in space – 150,000,000+
Most days in space – 359
Performed both Return-To-Flight missions after losses of both Challenger and Columbia
First recovery for repair of an in-service satellite
Launched the Hubble Space Telescope
Performed two repair missions on Hubble
Launched Mercury legend and hero John Glenn back into space

And she has one thing in particular that is near and dear to me, I have seen her fly before.
Way back in 1989 I was fortunate enough to be down in Florida when STS-29 launched, Discovery’s 8th mission. I was in Fort Lauderdale at the time, but was more than happy to make the 3 hour schlep up the coast at 4:00 am to see the spectacle of a lifetime. I was not disappointed.
We had to sit some two extra hours before they finally declared her “go”, but man… was it worth the wait.
As the radio called T-minus 6 seconds, we could just make out the glare of the orbiter’s three main engines firing.
Then at zero, the sun rose for the second time that day.
When the SRB’s (Solid Rocket Boosters) lit, the 4.5 million pound beast hopped off the pad with a vengeance, clocking more than 100 mph as her tail cleared the launch tower (a mere 200 ft up). Two massive columns of white hot plasma scorched earthward in the best fireworks display I’ve ever seen.
Then the sound hit us.
Even from some 12 miles (19 km) away on the side of the road in Titusville, the vibration was so intense it was hard to speak. From the way they rattled, I thought the large plate glass windows in the shops across the street from us were going to blow apart.
No theatrical reproduction of what this sounds like even remotely prepares you for the real thing.
The sound is in fact so powerful that if you were to be standing within 1000 ft or less of the launch pad the sheer intensity of it would kill you.
We stared in awe as it climbed.
Then the call “go for throttle up, 104%” came. That always catches my attention.
On the one hand, I think it’s the coolest sounding command of the space age, I mean, they don’t go to 100%, they go to 104%. It’s like somebody at NASA decided that the shuttle engines could go to 11.
In reality, the reason is late in the development phase the folks at Rocketdyne were able to certify the engines at 104% of their original rated power, but since the flight planning had already been done with the original ratings, it was easier just to create a new setting of 104% (apparently they can now even be brought up to 109% in manual override, but I don’t know if that’s ever been used).
But on the other hand, that call is also more than a bit chilling.
It’s the last thing the crew onboard Challenger heard before a bad SRB gasket cooked their fuel tank and quickly thereafter vaporized most of their spacecraft.
Having occurred less than three years earlier at that time, this was no doubt the reason everyone – me included - seemed to hold their breath for just an instant.
But all was good.
A moment later, we heard “SRB separation” and the ominous white brutes were let go. We could just barely make out the contrails arcing away from the orbiter some 150,000 ft up. What a sight.
The orbiter then pretty much disappeared from view but we all stood transfixed, listening in a trance as Mission Control called out the numbers:

“3 minutes 15 seconds… Discovery now 51 nautical miles in altitude, 66 nautical miles downrange, velocity now reading 6500 feet per second.”
“5 min 15 sec, Discovery now 63 nautical miles in altitude, 202 nautical miles downrange, velocity now reading 11,000 feet per second”
“7 min 30 sec, Discovery now 67 nautical miles in altitude, 485 nautical miles downrange”
“8 min 15 sec, Discovery now 75 nautical miles in altitude, 650 nautical miles downrange, velocity 24,900 feet per second, standing by now for main engine cutoff”
“8 min 45 sec, MECO (main engine cutoff)”

That’s it, she was in space.
The crowd roared and applauded.
Although that was some 22 years ago, I can recall it like it was yesterday.
I nearly had the chance to witness something even more spectacular, a night launch, the very next year.
I was back down for spring break again in Pompano Beach with my gang, and on the very last night before our return, Atlantis was scheduled to launch a secret military payload at around midnight.
We’d figured this was obviously too good to pass up, so we decided to stop in Titusville to catch it.
But delay after delay was called, and finally around 2:00 am, with only 30 seconds left in the countdown, they scrubbed. Talk about a letdown! Especially since we now had to get back in the cars and drive back non-stop back to Montreal in order to be back at work on time. Sans sleep.
For whatever reason, I have never been able to synch up my vacation schedule to make it to another launch since. But fate has a funny way of intervening. Around five years ago, my mother decided she was going to try and spend a few months each winter down in Florida, and lo and behold, the best deal she got was at a little gated community on the beach in Cape Canaveral, some 20 minutes from the Space Center. I swear I had absolutely nothing to do with this.
But no matter when I’ve come to visit, I haven’t been able to catch a launch.
Until now.
With the shuttle program officially ending in June 2011, I realized this is pretty much it, only three chances left, and the last one in June, STS-135, is not even officially funded yet. So really it’s two.
Originally scheduled to go in November, Discovery’s last mission got pushed back when they found some cracks in the main fuel tank (that big orange thing in the middle). This is generally considered bad, what with it containing several million pounds of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
So they began working on a fix, and the date kept getting pushed back. Finally they locked it in on Thursday, February 24th. I looked at my calendar. Hmmm. Work schedule was manageable. Mom leaves to come home that Saturday, check flights and… bingo! I managed to score West Jet $129.00 one-way special just days before the launch.
But the best was yet to come.
The original plan was to walk to the end of my mom’s beach, which puts you in Jetty Park at Port Canaveral. This is about 15 miles (25 km) from the launch pad. As you can’t really get any closer on than 11 – 12 miles anywhere else, this is pretty good. And certainly convenient.
But I really had always wanted to witness a launch right from Kennedy Space Center.
Lord knows I’ve tried.
On many occasions when a launch was announced, I’d race the KSC website to see if I could score a pass. No dice. These things get snapped up quicker than Justin Bieber tickets.
And sure enough, the minute I had booked the flight, I went straight to the KSC site.
“Sorry, and thanks for playing…”
I didn’t expect otherwise.
So yesterday I decided just the same to get some use out of my annual pass and go see what was happening at Kennedy, get some shots of Discovery on the pad, and catch some of the buzz.
And it was then I discovered that they actually still had visitor’s center passes.
(Pause, look of disbelief)
“One, please!”
I suppose good things do come to those who wait.
So I am off now to bid the lady adieu on her final mission, and to hear the mighty roar of 6 million+ pounds of thrust tear the sky apart for what is now nearly the very last time.
And I’ll be a mere 6 miles away.
Stay tuned... :)