T -0

At T -9 minutes a 40 minute hold began. Over a thousand last-minute (har) parameters were checked.

At T -4 minutes, a woman with an amazing voice led us in the National Anthem. The kids knew all the words from their school performance on Veteran's Day, and sang with gusto.

At T-0 a cloud of steam erupted from the base of the platform and the shuttle rose in a white-hot streak into the sky. Our crowd cheered and hollered and took about 14,000 pictures all in the space of one and half minutes until the brightness disappeared.

Here is a link to a video Marian took of the launch, complete with commentary by her youngest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOHn6odjdbs

Banana Creek

By 11:30am the weather was green and all systems go. At each holding period in the countdown, everyone at Banana Creek breathed a little quicker and more shallowly, waiting. Banana Creek is the site of the museum housing one of three extant Saturn rockets, the power under Apollo. All three stages of the craft hangs suspended from the ceiling high above. The craftsmanship is beautiful.

Outside the museum three miles away sat the Atlantis shuttle, topped up with ~500,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, ready to blow.

Weather

Launch day we woke late to clouds and a light wind. A weather lieutenant from NASA said that the cloud ceiling made for "red" conditions, which meant if the conditions didn't improve, and if the aircraft sent up at 11:30 report the cloud level as too thick, the launch would not happen. If the shuttle flew through a large bank of clouds at speed (800mph and rapidly increasing) water droplets would have the force of rocks, and potentially rip the tiles surrounding the orbiter, or static electricity could build up and interfere with abort codes. Weather at the overseas landing sites was green. This meant that if the shuttle needed to, it could abort and try to land in Zaragoza, Spain.

The Psychology of Astronauts

During our tour of the Vehicle Assembly Building our group was joined by a tall, angular man in a blue jumpsuit. The guide spoke for some time pointing out the features of the structure, until one woman raised her hand and said, “I’d like to know about that man in the blue jumpsuit.”

The switch flipped, and the diffuse attention of the group either magnetized towards the man in the blue suit, or, in a few cases, away. He was of course an astronaut. His name was Rick Linnehan; he’d been on four missions, had spacewalked (“a misnomer”), and put his original training as a veterinarian to use at least once as an astronaut, nursing 200 rat dams and pups in transit to the International Space Station. He spoke clearly, with simultaneous self-assurance and self-effacement, patiently answering all our questions, one by one. And when he talked about the amount of force needed to reach orbit, the “smash,” he seemed like a Nascar driver with a Ph.D.

Is it clear yet that this person had almost an indecent amount of charisma? If there were such an instrument as a charismometer, Rick Linnehan, and the other astronauts and top NASA administrators would be pegging out. Marian and Jason told us a main requirement for being accepted into the space program is being good with people, since PR is such a substantial part of the job.

The astronauts we met emphasized, quite rightly, the massive collective effort involved in spaceflight. They were universally humble, at least in personal interactions. The I Ching says “All things come to him who is modest and kind in a high position.” There are no positions physically higher than those of astronauts, and their lives seem largely to consist of very public service.

Big and Slow

One of the largest enclosed structures in the world, volumetrically, the Vehicle Assembly Building, looked like a regular warehouse. About three miles away it seemed large, fairly large, and about three blocks distant. A mile away one it began to take scale, when the vehicles beneath it were just visible. And then the actual size of the flag painted on its side became evident. And then Jason told us that the doors are over 400 feet high. The doors.

I've never been dizzy looking up before.

The Vehicle Assembly Building is where spacecraft are, well, assembled. Fifty-two open floors allow access to every level of an orbiter or rocket. The craft are built on platforms bolted to pillars; when the hour comes, the doors open, crawlers slide under the platforms, the pillars are removed and the spacecraft is slowly, slowly driven to its launch pad. The crawler driver looks down, only, following a laser line on a near frictionless gravel path (sparks bad). The journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad can take up to eight hours. And it's right over there.

The Grand Tour

At yesterday morning's orientation with two of the operational heads of NASA, members of our group introduced themselves. There was a friend of one of the astronauts on the Atlantis crew, who had played with him in the NFL,a bevy of researchers from Germany, at least one EU representative from Denmark, a high school teacher from Georgia whose class has designed an experiment going up in the shuttle, and a Florida professor whose team had done the same (he was the gentleman so adept at spotting alligators), aerospace engineers, employees, defense workers, more friends, and family. While these somewhat lengthy introductions proceeded, a picture of the International Space Station shimmered on the screen behind the moderator. With its shining arrays, long, connecting corridors and symmetrical extensions it seemed too fragile for Earth, as indeed it is. This shuttle mission is to take replacement and spare parts to help keep the Space Station operational for the next ten years. But after five more launches, no more American astronauts will go to the station unless they get a ride from an international partner, most likely Russia, on the Soyuz.

This Atlantis mission is STS-129, which stands for Space Transport System (payload number 129), and like the shuttles before it, its purpose it to transport people and materials to the International Space Station. It moved me, the idea that so many people from different backgrounds and countries have traveled together to investigate physical processes from a mutually created, utterly unique vantage. It symbolized a Grand Tour of technological progress, ambitions, and political accomplishments. Because what is politics except people working towards common goals despite differing interests? Or is it the other way around?

From the pre-launch industry party last night to the guide at the Saturn V museum, the question in people's minds is: What will happen to the space program now? There is no current governmental commitment to manned space exploration. When the shuttle program is discontinued, 7,000 immediate and 21,000 support people in the Cape Canaveral area alone will lose their jobs.

And the next question for some is: Why? Why is there no political will behind the space program? Why don't people see how cool it is? And I also wonder, why don't I know anything about the results of all those experiments transported to the Space Station by the shuttle?

Incidentally, you can find out when the International Space Station may be visible above you by going to this website: http://www.spaceweather.com/flybys/ and typing in your zip code.

Riding Fire

For all I know, the title of this blog is already a cliche, because it's just too easy. Doesn't it shock every monkey who thinks about it, that soft bodied mammals like us would even consider getting in instrumented lockers, ignite unbelievably powerful explosives directly beneath them, and rocket off our warm, securing earth into space? Space? Defined by incomprehensible vastness, killing cold, and absolutely no snacks? How curious would such an animal have to be?

I can't pretend I don't understand that level of curiosity, but it may not be a survival trait.

Alligators thrive in the 84,000 acre protected area owned by NASA near Cape Canaveral. Not perhaps in the immediate launch area, since humans die within 800 feet from the impact of sound waves alone. Yet, on the bus ride from our morning briefing for this very impressive tour to the Astronaut Hall of Fame, a guy in front of us spotted at least three gators in the ditches beside the road. (I saw two, several great blue herons, pelicans, and a host of egrets.) An alligator, our Florida friends Mari-Claire and Kira tell us, have a brain the size of a chicken's. And yet they have proved to be as durable a descendant of the Jurassic Age as turtles, sharks, or maybe, in a way, chickens. These animals have found their evolutionary groove.

Discontent in ditches, we may not last so long. We may vault past our limitations instead, at least for a few amazing moments, riding fire.