I count myself as a member of the "space generation." My father works for NASA Goddard, and I worked there for various contractors while in college and before graduate school, so I was steeped in both the myth and the reality of our country's explorations above the atmosphere. One of my earliest memories is of my parents letting me stay up late to see the moon landing on TV. I was in college when the first space shuttle went up, and just as my parents will always remember where they were and what they were doing when President Kennedy was killed, I remember the Challenger disaster. Britt and I were both pretty excited that we had the opportunity to see a launch.
I worked for a contractor at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, so I saw most of the early shuttle launches on the big screen in the Goddard auditorium. Some friends of mine at our university planned a trip to Florida once to go see a launch during spring break. Things of course rarely went on schedule, so I reluctantly decided not to go, figuring that if anything went wrong it would have been a wasted trip, because I couldn't really afford to miss classes to stay and watch a delayed launch. (As it turned out, the launch was postponed, so none of my friends got to see it either.)
This launch -- Discovery's 27th, the shuttle program's 96th -- was also delayed. Originally set for October, it was rescheduled for December 14th, and we thought we'd see it (what we could see of it) from St. Augustine. Delays allowed us to reach Titusville, across the ICW from Cape Canaveral, and then more delays kept us there, still waiting. The official line from NASA was that if they hadn't launched by December 18th, they would delay until January because of Y2K concerns, so when the weather got rainy and stayed that way, we were sure our opportunity was lost. But this mission was important: the astronauts were going to repair the gyroscopes on the Hubble Space Telescope, and it had been already out of commission long enough to have missed some important astronomical events. (Plus, in our opinions, NASA had a bit of egg on its face from its recent botches of Mars probes, and needed a p.r. boost.) So the decision was made to launch on the evening of the 19th, a beautiful and clear day. And we were there.
We rented a car with Alex and Penelope of Odyssey, who we've been traveling with off-and-on. Their sons are 8 and 9, and since our visit to the Kennedy Space Center they had been anticipating the shuttle launch like other kids anticipate Christmas. We all crammed into the car and drove back to the KSC parking lot, where we boarded buses to take us to the viewing area.
The attraction of this trip was that the on-site viewing area was the closest spot open to the public for watching the launch, less than 6 miles from the launch pad. They had roped off a long stretch along the causeway over the Banana River, big enough that even with a thousand people it wasn't crowded. We had a picnic dinner and watched the sunset, then turned our attention to the shuttle, which we could clearly see with binoculars, as we awaited the final countdown.
We watched the last bits of the gantry retract, the burners light, and then, in a great cloud of steam, the shuttle lifted off. Suddenly, the binoculars were superfluous -- the shuttle was too bright to look at directly with the naked eye, let alone with magnification. I switched to my sunglasses so I could continue to watch Discovery blaze across the night sky. It seemed like a slow, stately flight from our perspective, even though we knew the shuttle was really moving at incredible speed. After about half a minute, the rumble of liftoff finally reached us. A few minutes later, we watched the solid rocket boosters separate and fall. Shortly after the external fuel tank was jettisoned, about eight minutes from liftoff, the glow finally receded and Discovery was gone from view.