My first launch

But make no mistakes, KSC is still vivid and inspiring. Right across from the press site is the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), which is, without a doubt, one of the most impressive buildings in the world. The VAB was originally designed to assemble an entire Saturn V rocket, which was 370 feet tall. Try imagining a building with a vast central hangar, large enough to stack a rocket the equivalent of 30 stories high.

I've never experienced vast internal space before, and it brought to mind a lot of science-fiction fantasies of the future, sort of what the inside of the Death Star in Star Wars might look like. The building takes up eight acres, is over 525 feet tall, and has the same volume as four Empire State Buildings. On the outside, it is one giant white cube, with a 110 foot-long American Flag running down the side. On the inside, there are twinkling lights, and levels of concrete and black steel trusses that seem to disappear into the atmosphere. A fully assembled space shuttle, complete with fuel tanks, only makes it a third of the way up to the ceiling.

But SIRTF's rocket, in fact, was not put together inside the VAB (I was only there because I had begged, pleaded and cried to be included on a VIP tour). The relatively puny 100-foot high Delta rockets are assembled on site, right on the launch pad they blast off from.

A few weeks before, the main body of the rocket had been hoisted up inside a huge steel gantry, and nine solid rocket motors were strapped around the side. The delicate payload of the SIRTF satellite was put inside a large, padded nose-cone called a faring, which sat above the smaller second stage of the rocket. I wasn't there when SIRTF was sealed inside the rocket, but we had all been following the procedure from our home in California, watching live web-cams and reading up-to-the-minute reports (to see some of the pictures we were looking at, go to http://sirtf.caltech.edu/picturegallery/imageweek2003.shtml )

As far as Delta II rockets go, the one that SIRTF launched on was as powerful as they get. It's not that SIRTF is all that heavy, but we had to launch it into a very high orbit, actually letting it escape from Earth's gravity altogether. The Earth and moon are just too warm for an infrared (or heat-light) sensitive telescope to work in without tons of thermal shielding, so in the end it was cheaper to build a smaller spacecraft, but throw it farther out into deep, cold space.

The Delta rocket would do this in several stages. First, six of the rocket motors would ignite on the pad, and burn for just a few minutes until they ran out of fuel and were jettisoned. Then three more rockets would ignite and push SIRTF well out of the atmosphere, again burning for only a few minutes. After that, the second stage, which is really an entirely separate, smaller rocket that perches on top of the main body of the Delta, would take over and give SIRT enough speed to slip away from Earth. In less than ten minutes the whole thing would be over, and we would know whether or not SIRTF had safely reached space.

And so the launch day finally arrived. By this time I had been flying around for a few days, keeping up with the status of our last-minute tests, attending receptions, giving so many interviews for local television, radio, and Web audiences that I literally lost count of them, and attending the official guest briefing, which was held rather dramatically in the IMAX theater at KSC's Visitor Center. Honestly, I was fairly wigged out by that stage. It had all started to feel unreal, as if everything was happening in a movie, not in reality.

The weather had been a bit iffy that day, with scattered but powerful thunderstorms wreaking havoc on launch plans (clear weather and calm winds are a must for any launch). But the storms had kept well away from the launch site, and the official word was that we were go for launch. The lovely people at the KSC Protocol Office had given all the official guests a parking pass for the launch-viewing area, a small plush doll in the shape of a smiling Delta rocket, and a strong-smelling wrist band that was supposed to discourage mosquitoes.

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