Spaceman Spliff
Thursday Tiff, Noah and I hopped on a flight to Orlando with one goal in mind. AVOID the D-Word at all costs. Well that might not have been part of Noahs plan but we never even told him that Orlando was the home of the place that shall not be named. We went to Orlando to witness a far greater type of ride. A ride with a sign that states "you must be this smart to ride." Someday Noah will get to ride. The shuttle was scheduled for Liftoff from Cape Canaveral at 7:55pm for it's last night launch. We arrived early and decided to drive to the Kennedy Space Center for a look around, yeah, ummmm, you have to have passes to even go down that road on launch day! So we drove up to Titusville along the Indian River. We found a place to watch from and parked our badselves on a bench to wait for 8 hours. About an hour in I realized we were going to need some other seating options, so after a quick visit to a local fleamarket and 4$ later we had some sweet chairs. We eventually were surrounded by people. Some great folks from Scotland, Germany, and some guys that own a astronomy shop in North Carolina set up some telescopes right next to us. Noah had a blast looking at the Shuttle on its launch pad. I don't really know how to descibe the launch other than it was amazing.
Sitting and waiting
our super sweet chairs
Video speaks for itself
(So why can't I keep my stupid gob shut?)
Smoke trail, moon and shuttle on the left
Just a couple interesting facts; at 2 minutes the solid rocket boosters have burned all of their fuel and fall away, at four minutes the shuttle is traveling at 6000mph, and at 8 minutes they are in orbit. To give you an idea of the power of this thing, the largest commercial airliner engines in use are on the 777. each engine on the 777 produces 1 Hundred Thousand Pounds of Thrust. So a 777 takes off with a total of 200,000 pounds of thrust. By comparison the shuttle at lift-off is producing 7 MILLION pounds of thrust.
Needless to say it was pretty frickin awesome!
4 comments:
totally diggin' the chairs you scrounged up... did you get to bring 'em home as mementos of your trip or did you take a pic and ditch em?
took the pic and left them for someone else, we wanted to bring them home but when you are NonRev passengers it's best to not check anybags just incase you don't get on the plane..
Paul, I like reading your blog and this was a good idea. I bet Noah was pumped to see something like that. That's a once in a lifetime thing or maybe never for most of us. Cool!
-Seth
Words just aren't good enough to express the emotion felt. I am sooo glad you went and Noah got to see what his future looks like. I love the picture of him in the suit. Way cool!! I hope we never forget what a miracle the shuttle is. Good job dad, the only problem I see is how are you going to top this one?? I know..... the "D" place!!
P.s. in case you can't tell, this is grandma karen
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