If it’s not on your bucket list, please add it: Check out a shuttle launch. After Friday’s launch of Atlantis’ final voyage into orbit, there remain but two more. Discovery is scheduled to go up Sept. 16 and then Endeavour in mid-November. NASA plans to end the 30-year program by the end of this year.
Here’s why more than 40,000 spectators packed the Kennedy Space Center area last week. For the same reasons I was there three years ago for Discovery — after having exhausted all the usual excuses: not logistically convenient; susceptible to scrubs; easy to take for granted.
Here’s what the scene that day looked like:
The otherwise nondescript banks of the Banana River, near Port Canaveral, about 10 miles south of Kennedy Space Center launch pads. Perhaps a thousand people, mainly couples and families, had parked two- and three-deep along State Road 528.
The ad hoc hub was an RV with a big American flag and a large antenna representing the Launch Information Service & Amateur TV Systems, part of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. Its speakers were chronicling countdown information. It was also there just in case. Just in case something went horribly wrong with a shuttle that sits atop a half million gallons of rocket fuel and belches 7 million pounds of thrust. LISATS helped defray expenses by selling — for a donation — Space Shuttle Discovery Launch Witness certificates with names computer-printed. Of course, I got one and framed it.
Ninety minutes before scheduled launch, the atmosphere, although rife with anticipation, was casual and friendly. Refreshingly so. The air was occasionally punctuated with heavily-accented German, French and Spanish. Some of the English speakers were British, Australian and Welsh. Out-of-town license plates — from Oklahoma and Texas to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania — were almost as numerous as those from Florida. For some reason, North “First in Flight” Carolina plates seemed especially plentiful.
Folding chairs, blankets, binoculars and video and still cameras were much in evidence. People sat on roofs and hoods. But no music, no grills, no adult beverages and no boorish behavior. Tailgating NASA-style. Folks ready to revel with a cause.
That’s what makes it special. This is Team America accomplishing something important by flawlessly sending up another mission to the International Space Station. It’s a respite, however brief, from everything else. From everything that is wrong economically and politically. From partisanship and pandering. From natural disasters, man-made calamities and celebrity meltdowns. It’s seeing “Mission Accomplished” without the cynical, mendacious spin.
Say what you will about domestic priorities and the relative merits of travel beyond earth’s orbit, the moment you see that orange sphere separate itself from terra firma is an uplifting, patriotic rush. At that second, man realizing his potential to transcend his own limits is no mere abstraction. No more than earthly applications of space-travel technology and weightless experimentation.
We overuse and often insult the meaning of “hero.” But these shuttle astronauts redefine it. Memories of Challenger and Columbia are ever present and unspoken as eyes squint to follow the diminishing, booster-less dot and breaths are collectively held as the contrails slowly diffuse.
Godspeed, Discovery and Endeavor.
It’s worth it.