I couldn’t believe my ears … “We are green for launch” closely followed by “T minus 4minutes and counting” and everyone around us began to cheer. We heard these words through a man’s handheld shortwave radio that he had obviously managed to tune to the flight control communications of nearby Cape Canaveral. We were standing on the East Side of Kelly Park, Merrit Island just south of Cape Canaveral with about 2000 others (on the beach, in the park, on the roadway and up every possible roadside embankment) all were there to see the final launch of Space Shuttle Discovery.
I remembered being a little boy watching Discovery’s first mission and then spending hours making a plastic scale model of it mounted onto the back of a 747 and now I was about to see it, hear it and feel it from only a few kilometres away ... and then it happened, “we have lift off!” Everyone craned their necks to see it shooting up into the sky, and man did it move quickly. It took about 5 seconds after clearing the tower to come into view for us. We watched it curving up and away to the east and then waited till it shed the two booster rockets and was just a tiny spec of light like a star far above us.
And then came the noise and the vibration, unbelievable! It took almost a minute to reach us but we could clearly hear it and feel it through the ground and through the air – a bit like the rumble of a 747 taking off if you are very close by. Apparently upon re-entry, the locals tell us there is a sonic boom they hear right across the state, which scares everyone silly till they know what it is. An amazing thing to witness and be there for – what a privilege.
Michael
No comments:
Post a Comment