My best friend works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and she sent me the link to NASA TV to watch the live launch of SS Atlantis at 1:01CST. Atlantis is off to visit the Hubble Space telescope for the last maintenance run. This is a momentous moment; Hubble has done more for the popularisation of space science than any other experiment since the moon landings. I’ve waxed lyrical about the effect the Hubble Deep Field images had on me in other venues. As sad I am at the thought of Hubble dying alone in the cold, I am immeasurably and childishly exited about the next generation James Webb Space Telescope that will replace our favourite, fault ridden behemoth.
Goddard played a major role in building Hubble, so the employees were treated to a live-feed in the campus auditorium. When I visited GSFC to see SWIFT, the satellite she was working on a few years back, I got to see the HST mock-ups, the clean rooms it was assembled in and so on. It’s amazing, and I recommend anyone who has never visited a NASA site to do so immediately. Preferably taking a few compliant employees with you so you get the insiders tour!
Aside from the live-feed dying at t-10s it was great. Yeah…missing the actual launch sucked, but the feed returned at ~t+45s, so you could follow the climb up & away from Kennedy, with communication to Houston. My friend wondered if NASA had deliberately cut the feed in case something (bad) happened, but it seemed to me to just fizzle out from over subscription to limited bandwidth. Who knows. I prefer to think that Big Brother isn’t editing my viewing of our most amazing scientific adventures, but…I also hope that an institution that regularly puts mankind in space, both literally and vicariously, doesn’t suffer from limited bandwidth problems…so who knows?
Watching the two boosters drop away from the shuttle from a camera mounted on the fuel line to the main booster was awesome, and then at t+6 minutes or so the shuttle rolls to become “top-up” from our perspective and you can see the curve of the earth below. It looks like they must be “in space” already, but they have a long way to go yet. Houston is feeding them information about possible alternative landing sites if something happens, whilst at the time time letting them know they will be able to reach orbit even if two of the three engines fail.
At t+8 minutes the main booster detaches and the feed is lost, but by now they’re reaching a safe altitude (orbital altitude) and beginning to go through their post-launch procedures.
It’s wonderful and I love it. Watching the shuttle launch (albeit by replay), and watching it blast up and away, climbing and accelerating faster than anything we’ve created, defying gravity and our Home World’s eternal pull, makes me proud to be human. More than that, it makes me proud to be a scientist.
To be a tiny part of the human scientific endevour is an honour we should never take lightly.
I can never watch. I’ll follow tweets about it, live, but I just can’t watch. Fortunately, last night I was in a debate about space travel that took place at the same time as the launch, so I had no option to watch.
Man – it’s exciting! And extraordinary. You can positively feeeel the grunting and straining of this mountain of metal as it attempts to unshackle itself form the tedium of earthly attraction. For anyone who doesn’t believe Ian or me, check the launch vid here#
I’d forgotten how much I love this stuff until reading your description. When I asked my boss if I could come and work in his group almost 7 years ago, I warned him I’d have to give up my dreams of becoming a cosmonaut. He laughed, and reminded me about it for years after. I sang Space Oddity at his funeral. A fitting farewell.
He also introduced me to a Finnish (Karelian) group, Folkswagen who had an incredible song titled Kosmonautti. Unfortunately, it ain’t been youtubed yet, but this is the general idea, and there’s more available here
However, I’m not surprised that the weblink crashed. NASA is an organisation that couldn’t even figure out that rubber becomes more brittle when it’s frozen. And therefore less suitable for using to launch metal mountains.
Fins (Karelians? Sounds a bit Star Trek to my untrained ear) dig on stripes huh?
I hate flying and when my friend asked me if I’d go if I got a free shot and I said no, she hit me. Really. Hard. I rephrased to say no, I’d give you my seat…
That sounds like a Pavlovian response to me.
Karelia (Karjala) is the border region between Eastern Finland and Western Russia. It’s also a popular beer brand over here. The Russians took a big chunk of it (the land – they wisely didn’t bother with the beer) after they failed to invade Finland in the Winter & Continuation wars (around 1939-40, then 41-44), so it’s kind of an emotive region & issue over here.
The Finns may be fierce defenders of their own territory and developers of the Molotov cocktail, but they couldn’t broker a good peace settlement for shit.
Apparently there was a civil war in 1918, lasting 4 months. I think that was Finland…
Ian>yes, correct indeed. Between the “reds” and the “whites”. And that would be in the after math of WWI and becoming independent from Russia in 1917. Gruesome thing, civil war.
I know, blody horrid. We’ve had two official ones. One self-contained within England in 1641–1651, and another with a minor outlying island in 1775–1783…
We (Canadians) had a war with that “minor outlying island” in 1812. As a result, the border remained in the same place, and both sides claimed victory.
That seems terribly Canadian, somehow.
We1 did burn down the Whitehouse though.
1 I’m 16 days away from Canadian citizenship, I get to say we.
So did we!
I never tire of watching the shuttle take-off. Your description, Ian, was great and I am reminded of sitting in my elementary school library and watching it. Then watching it again on the news that night. I have missed many of the 125 launches, but am glad to have seen the ones I have. Maybe we will all get to ride on the space elevator though.
Thanks Craig. My friend at NASA went for the ESA call for astronauts last year. She made the third round, which is top 10%. She was heartbroken to not make the final cut though. She is now pushing to be bff with Richard Branson so she can ride the commercial Space Liners LOL. One of her superiors is actually a consultant for Virgin Galactic (I think), so I’m always telling her to be pushing that connection!
One of the PhD students in our department made the ESA cut – at least I think he’s down to the final 8 or so. A bunch of my friends held a spaceman party for him a couple of weeks ago. The photos were mystifying!
Unfortunately, my dangling green tentacles didn’t get out of their mothballs – I was out of the
galaxycountry on the day.Wow, Mike that’s awesome. I don’t know if I’ll tell Joe or not… actually, i think she reads this blog so now she knows. She was telling me about some of the tests they did and I think I would have flunked round 1!
What was interesting was not knowing if the test was real, say for spacial awareness, or a psych-eval for something else. The whole thing was a mash up. So Joe doesn’t kow if she wasn’t smart enough (highly dubious!) or, ‘failed’ some psychometric parameter. Personally, I don’t think it as failure. If they’re looking for the 8-10 tail-enders, the extremophiles, you can be well ahead of the curve and just not back the last 0.1%. That’s not failure by any standard!
Well, if it makes Joe feel any better, or departmental -Duck Dodgers– space-cadet is a nice guy, but an incredibly lazy field-biologist. He was a field assistant to a friend of mine on an exotic tropical island for a field season a few years back. My friend didn’t have too many good words to say about his work ethic when they returned after 3 months of near solitude.
It obviously takes a particularly special sort of nut-case to make the astro-grade. Jussi, if you’re reading this, Andres hopes you put in more effort up there!
Maybe he’s found his niche? :)
hm, I wonder if that was the shuttle I saw in the distance when I drove to work this morning…. ;) joke aside it was very much like a long peak with an enormous smoke thing after it – like an airplane but thicker and you could see it much longer.
But alas, I think it might have been something completely differnt?!
Another UFO?