It’s about a quarter after 10 pm on a Saturday night as we sit here in our motel room awaiting departure time to drive up A1A here in Cocoa Beach to our predetermined perch to watch Endeavour blast off at 4:39 Sunday morning. NASA tv is keeping us mostly mute company with a great camera-eye’s view of the shuttle stack during the early stages of the countdown. Shuttle Launch Control has just announced the beginning of the two hour, thirty minute hold at T-3:00. It’s time for them to send a couple of crews up to the pad for some realtime eyeball checks to see that all looks good.
The STS-130 crew, I heard this afternoon, will be working the graveyard shift on their 13 day mission. They were sleeping this afternoon in preparation for the early morning launch and their first workday in space. I think they only have about a ten minute window to launch. The International Space Station will pass 200 miles overhead, then Endeavour will start the chase with a flash that I hear fills the sky during nighttime launches. Such a sight it must be. I feel very lucky to be present for the last nighttime launch of a space shuttle.
Cindy and I got a suggestion of where we might get a great look at the launch from a friend back home in Dayton with Air Force and NASA connections. We imagine we’ll be joined by lots of people, so we’re going to head up the road just after midnight to claim a vantage point. We’ll hang out in the car for whatever time it takes to get us to 4:39 AM EST. We bought a camcorder just for this occasion, and I’ll have my digital SLR at the ready. I heard the NASA director say today to foreign journalists here to cover the launch for the first time to be prepared to just stand and watch. He said he weeps at every shuttle launch, sensing the power and knowing friends riding the rocket. I do want to just watch, but I realize this is a moment to record for posterity. I’ll be recording as much as I can. I suspect there will be a tear or two for me, too.
STS-130 will be peopled with six astronauts, all going along for the ride and the work involved. None will be staying at the ISS. Their primary cargo is the Tranquility node and the 7-windowed cupola, both built by the European Space Agency. This afternoon I rode up the motel elevator with a guy who took a look at my 2003 Inventing Flight tee shirt that invited a comment. I gushed on about that summer in Dayton, then he told me he was with the European press -- and will watch the launch from the media room at Kennedy Space Center. His smile was from ear to ear.
And just to heighten this event for me, I am savoring a re-reading of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two. I first read it hungrily when it came out in 1982. I reckoned it was high time to read it again. After all, it is 2010 -- and I don’t think I’ll ever get any closer to beloved space than this event. It’s been fun. I’ve loved Clarke’s books since I was a kid.
I suppose when I set the video of the launch to music, I could use Also Sprach Zarathustra, or maybe The Blue Danube, both made famous for space in Stanley Kubrick’s blockbuster film of Clarke’s book, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Oh, how transformative that film was for me in 1968, my senior year in high school. It’s probably because of that story -- and the flight successes of Ohio homeboys John Glenn and Neil Armstrong -- that I became smitten with space and space travel way back then. It’s been a long road from there to here. I’m one lucky guy.
Today’s elder idea: ‘Dave -- my mind is going. I can feel it. My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it...’
HAL 9000 computer talking to Discovery astronaut David Bowman
from 2001: A Space Odyssey
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