Last night I had the good fortune of being on a beach about 115 miles south of Cape Canaveral, Florida watching the launch of the space shuttle Discovery. I've long been fascinated by space shuttles. I remember one time when I was a kid my family and I were in South Carolina and my dad offered to drive us to Florida to see the launch. But we decided against it, and good thing too because that launch got delayed. (And the one that went yesterday was supposed to go Wednesday when I was not in Florida. Lucky for me it went last night!)
The atmosphere was really fun-- there were lots of people on the beach and some smart ones had brought binoculars (I was jealous!) The launch took place at twilight -- the sky was a bright periwinkle over the ocean and a hazy peach as the sun set over land. We knew it was supposed to go at 7:43 pm (e.s.t) and so right then everyone was excitedly scanning the sky. Right on schedule it just appeared and headed up, up and over the ocean. Everyone cheered. It made a sort of arc in the sky and then we could see the rocket boosters separate from the shuttle and drop in the ocean. For a while I was able to keep my eyes on both the boosters and the shuttle simultaneously but then I switched to just watching the shuttle until it disappeared from our view. We even heard a slight reverberation as the shuttle left the earth's atmosphere and entered outer space.
Long after the shuttle was out of sight a long trail of its smoke (a bright orange colour - absorbed from the setting sun) stayed in a long vertical line in the darkening sky, reminding us that just a few short moments before it had been there, hurtling through the Florida sky...
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