My first launch

I drove over around midnight, following the signs to the guest launch viewing area. After a drive down a dark, swampy road (one guard warned me about wild pigs in the area), I finally got a glimpse of SIRTF's launch pad, located about three miles away across the Banana River. The pad and the sky directly above it were completely lit up by colossal search lights, which seemed amazingly bright even from where I was standing, miles away.

The launch pad and the rocket were tiny, bright, points in the distance; that was pretty much all you could see. But to give us more of a sense of involvement, NASA had set up a tented area with several television sets, showing close-up views of the pad, as well as the view from a camera mounted on the rocket itself (this is a recent development that allows engineers to monitor the launch from the rocket's point of view. It is also totally cool to see what things would look like if you were riding on the back of that beast.). There were coolers full of water bottles and sandwiches, and a loudspeaker system to let us listen in on the countdown.

It all went very fast. I arrived at the visitor site about 90 minutes before launch, and I thought the waiting time would drag by excruciatingly slowly. Instead, it seemed like I had just grabbed my water bottle and said hello to a few friends when it was time to launch. I will never really understand where that hour and a half went.

The main rocket uses liquid oxygen for fuel, and the tanks were allowed to vent great clouds of steam until just a few minutes before launch, when they were brought to their final pressure. And then the announcer started saying "10, 9, 8 ... " and everything really started to seem unreal.

The first thing you see is a light at the bottom of the pad that gets really bright, and then it just keeps on getting brighter until it lights up the whole sky. The tiny rocket, which looks just like the brightest firework in the world, slowly lifts off the pad on a column of smoke and steam lit-up by rocket fire. A few seconds later the sound hits you, a deep, firey rumbling that never gets all that loud, but seems to fill all the space around you.

One thing that surprised me is that you can see the plume of flame from the rocket for a very long time. After lift-off, the announcer kept tracking how fast the rocket was going, and how far away it was. In an insanely short amount of time, I heard him saying that the rocket was going 18,000 miles per hour, and was already 50 miles away. And I could still see the rocket plume clearly. How big, I wondered, was that orange wave of flame? It must have been miles across. The announcer made another count-down to main-engine cut-off, and sure enough, the plume disappeared from the sky.

After that we all huddled around the television sets as the booster rockets burned out and were thrown into the sea, a wonderful view from the on-board camera, and then waited to hear if the rocket would be picked up by our first tracking station, a boat out in the Indian Ocean. It was. Slowly, people started folding up the chairs and tables, and we headed back to our cars.

It's a hard experience to process. I am still amazed by the raw power of a rocket, and yet how incredibly precise it is. SIRTF was inserted into exactly the right orbit, the delicate telescope undamaged by its ride on top of a mountain of fire. And we do this routinely -there have been over 300 Delta Rocket launches since their inception in 1960, with a 95 percent success rate.

It's good to remember that we still do miraculous things; we are far more than just a dim extension of a glorious past. Maybe this launch will be the last one I ever attend. Maybe not. But as I headed back to the hotel, disoriented, tired, mildly elated and feeling a bit lost, I hoped I'd be back for more.

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