Bob Villwock

With  a little luck and good timing, and with many thanks to my friend Jeremy and his friend who works at NASA, I managed to get the whole family to Kennedy Space Center last week for the launch. I have wanted to do this for about 29 years. In fact, today is the 29th anniversary of the first space shuttle launch. The guys from Rush were there at that first launch in 1981, and it inspired their song “Countdown,” which they then performed live at the very first concert I went to. On November 4, 1984 at the Richfield Coliseum (which is now gone), Rush had a giant video screen behind them, and they synched their song live to a giant video of the launch of Columbia. After that, I desperately wanted to see a launch, but going to Florida and getting the timing right is difficult and there is always a decent risk of NASA changing the schedule for lots of reasons, not to mention the weather. Plus, there would always be some future launch that might work out better. Maybe I’d just happen to be in Florida some time when there was a launch. So, the years passed, and I never really did it.

There are only a few launches remaining before the end of the shuttle program, so it was time to make the effort, take the risk of traveling without knowing for sure if it would go, and hope for the best. We got the best. Thanks to Jeremy’s friend, we got a front row seat out on the causeway. Thanks to the timing, we got a night time launch that was so close to sunrise that it also featured a visible flyover of the International Space Station, and the sun shining on the shuttle and its plume once it was high enough. Sunrise on the vapor trail was a nice touch too as we made our way slowly back to Titusville in the traffic after the launch.

Here’s the launch video from our little camera. I didn’t expect to record much of the launch with this–mostly I wanted to record the looks on the kids faces–but I think it captures the whole vibe pretty well.

My kids were pretty puzzled by my apparent need to play “Countdown” over and over on the rental car’s cd player, but I think after the launch they understood a little better.

Here’s the official NASA video, which does not feature my kids at all.