Discovery Launch
So I went and watched the launch of NASA’s Discovery shuttle from Highway 1A on one of the bridges over a river. I wanted to go to Jetty Park since it looked like it was closer when I checked on the map, but the police were redirecting traffic away from the park by the time I got there, so I had to turn around and go back. I dragged my friend Paul along with me and we rolled to a stop on the side of the road a couple minutes before the launch. I wanted to take some pictures, but I didn’t have time to figure out how to work the camera I borrowed from my roommate in the dark and we were pretty far away, so the ones I got aren’t all that impressive.
Anyways, it was fun to go see it since I’m moving and this will probably be my last chance to see a shuttle launch for quite some time. The shuttle looked like a huge ball of fire shooting up in to the sky, but I thought the coolest part was that after it had gotten way up there, you could see first one, and then another pair of tiny red lights, like tiny Betelgeuse stars, fall away from the shuttle. They must have been the booster rockets detatching and falling back to earth.
And now I feel like a big idiot. I’ve been looking at Google Maps while typing this post out and assuming you can actually get there, found a great place to watch the shuttle launch from. Using the sattelite option, I spotted the crawler that is used to move the shuttle around and figured out which of the launch pads are probably the ones used for shuttle launches. It looks like you can get really close if you go just north of the airforce base and camp out in the wildlife preserve. I’ll have to remember that if I come back again before the shuttle is retired.
Finally found a plugin that actually works and will let me kind of do what I want to with picture galleries, so here’s one of the pictures I took of the launch.
