Update: Around Ars, our minds tend to always gravitate towards space. But right now it's happening more often than usual given the rapidly approaching 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Today, however, marks the anniversary of a different historic NASA occasion—the last launch of the modern Space Shuttle program. Ars was at Kennedy Space Center on this day eight years ago, so we're resurfacing our report on the experience from July 2011. It appears unchanged below.
MERRITT ISLAND, Florida—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes space as "really big." Kennedy Space Center (KSC) might be peanuts compared to space but, for human-sized visitors, it's pretty big. Located on Florida's Atlantic coast, an hour's drive east of Orlando's tourist spots, KSC has been NASA's site of choice for sending people into space since the 1960s. Covering the northern half of Merritt Island, its 219 square miles are studded with launch complexes surrounded by semitropical nature. Last week, Ars braved KSC's heat, rain, and crowds to watch Atlantis, and the 30-year Space Shuttle program, head into space for the final time.
Launching rockets over the ocean has quite a few advantages, but it's also subject to the capricious weather patterns of the Atlantic. Getting something into a specific orbit is more complicated than just kicking the tires and lighting the fires; each day only has a discrete launch window of a few minutes. If it's raining at the launch site, flight path, or at the various emergency landing sites in France and Spain during that time, no one's going to space that day. This makes attending a launch somewhat fraught: the weather doesn't care about anyone's plans, plane tickets, hotel reservations, or work schedule.
Driving to KSC, things did not look promising. NASA scheduled the launch for Friday, July 8th at 11:26 am, with successive launch windows on Saturday and Sunday. By Wednesday afternoon, the 45th Weather Squadron was predicting a 70 percent chance of delay. To make matters worse, if Friday did have to be scrubbed, Sunday would probably be the next attempt, as NASA wanted to give its teams enough time to get home, rest, and get back again, a process that would be seriously complicated by the hundreds of thousands of expected visitors and the traffic jams they'd bring.
Rain battered the causeway as we drove to KSC on Thursday, but luckily my fears of aquaplaning to a watery death weren't realized. The reality of the trip sunk in at our first sight of the Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB. This giant box-like building, the largest single-story building in the world, is where NASA put together the components of successive Apollo and Shuttle launch vehicles. It's also where launch vehicles begin their slow journey atop a crawler-transporter to Launch Complex 39A, followed by a fast journey into orbit.
At the media center
Badges acquired, we made it to the Media Center. In the shadow of the VAB, dozens of TV news vans were corralled together, satellite dishes pointing to the skies. News organizations from across the world were out in force. Some national broadcasters like CBS had their own buildings, weatherbeaten after three or more decades of exposure to the elements. Others were in trailers perched on cinderblocks, underneath tents and canopies. The rest of us were left jockeying for space in the Media Center and its annex. Beyond this teeming journovillage, a lawn reached out to the water's edge, where the countdown clock and a flagpole framed the three-mile stretch of water that separated us from LC39A.
Flanking the lawn were a number of tents. Boeing was on hand with their new CST-100 crew capsule, a seven-seat design that's being developed by the private sector. A mockup of the internal configuration was split in half. Nestled next to it was a prototype of the pressure shell, made from just two pieces of spun aluminum bolted together—according to Boeing, the lack of welds should make gaining manned flight certification a much quicker process.
Orion, the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle under development for NASA by Lockheed-Martin, was in another tent. This was the actual test vehicle, festooned with data acquisition systems, fresh from undergoing a test drop out the back of a C-141 last year. Unlike Boeing's design, Orion will do more than just travel to low earth orbit and back; a week to the Moon, or even many months to Mars and back, could be in the cards.
Sitting in between these two tents was the Tweetup tent. NASA has done a fantastic job of adopting social media as part of its outreach, and it has invited groups of lucky Twitterers to watch recent launches. Past treats at tweetups have included a look inside the VAB (something the public hasn't been allowed to do since before the beginning of the Shuttle program), as well as photo ops at the launch pad. For this final launch, Bob Crippen, Commander of STS-1, was on hand to talk to attendees, as was Elmo from Sesame Street, who was the only celebrity I spotted other than Seth Green. The real celebs were the numerous former shuttle astronauts, easily recognizable in their blue jumpsuits.
Checking in with the weather desk reinforced the fatalistic feeling in the air. There had been a couple of lightning strikes in the vicinity, one hitting the water tower near the launch pad. However, once NASA's safety concerns had been satisfied, we lined up by a row of buses for a photo opportunity with Atlantis on the pad. Everyone was excited, veterans and novices alike. That feeling even lasted after the skies opened up once again, soaking us to the bone as we stood in the rain waiting for the camo-clad security team and their sniffer dogs to give our bags the all-clear.
Visiting the launch pad
We had bumped into some familiar faces who were covering the launch for the Guardian. On the three-mile ride we swapped stories; how we fell in love with space, whether we thought we'd actually get to see a launch, where we were when Challenger took its final flight.
(Challenger, Columbia, and Apollo 1 have always affected me quite deeply. January 28th is my birthday, and for all three tragedies to have happened within a few days strikes me as a cruel cosmic birthday present. The tragedies of Challenger and Columbia seemed to perpetually hang around in the background. Maybe I'm a bit morbid, but they underlined the fact that traveling into space is anything but routine, despite the public perception.)
The crawler-transporter was visible through the fogged-up bus windows, parked a safe distance from LC39A. The buses pulled up a quarter of a mile from the pad, just before the Crawlerway sloped gently up to it. Trackmarks were embossed on the surface of the Crawlerway, two long ribbons of pink Alabama river rocks that stretched from the VAB to the pad. You could follow them to see, sitting there in all its glory, Atlantis!
I'd seen Enterprise several times, as it currently lives near my home, but there's something quite different seeing something in its natural habitat rather than permanently parked in a museum. Even if you'd told me the launch would be postponed until after we had to return to DC, I'd have considered the trip a success.
The rain picked up again, putting the same question in everyone's mind: "Will they launch?" Word filtered across the Twitter grapevine that the decision would be made in the middle of the night. Thursday night didn't involve a lot of sleep. Waking at 2am, we saw that NASA had given the go-ahead to begin fueling the external tank, even though the forecast for launch was still only 30 percent.
As attractive as a full night's sleep seemed, to sleep in and miss the launch while stuck in traffic would have been unforgivable. At 4am, my alarm went off again and we hit the road. Traffic was light until we got within a couple of miles from the causeway. We traveled this next stretch at about the same speed as a loaded crawler-transporter, but the brightening skies and lack of rain kept spirits high.
The jam evaporated at the causeway checkpoint, as only those with badges or passes were allowed onto KSC—the vast majority of spectators watched from the beaches of Titusville. "Carnival" probably isn't the right way to describe the atmosphere at the Media Center. Unlike the crowds that packed the Visitor's Center, causeway, and other sites, (almost) everyone was there to work as well as watch the launch. Yet the enthusiasm and affection for the program was palpable.
And then it was time to launch.
Go for launch
Watching Atlantis launch was a deeply moving experience, one that affects me even as I write this. With nine minutes on the clock, NASA held the countdown for twenty minutes to make sure that weather would cooperate, both here at the Cape and also at the alternate landing sites in Spain and France. Listening to the various desks at Mission Control each give their OK to go, then seeing the red digital clock finally move from -0:09:00 brought a lump to my throat for the first (but not last) time that day.
With 31 seconds to go, NASA announced a final two minute hold, to make sure that the vent cap was fully retracted. The countdown started again to cheers, shortly followed by the familiar refrain of "Ten… Nine… Eight… " Standing down near the waterline, beyond the famous countdown clock, our view was of the top of the external fuel tank and the gantry poking up from behind a landscape of dark tropical green.
This image was suddenly joined by blossoming white clouds, rapidly followed by Atlantis rising off the pad atop a blinding plume of rocket thrust. Several seconds later, the sound arrived. The first analogy I could think of was a washing machine full of rocks mixed over the sound of tearing giant sheets of canvas. Thinking about it more, I keep coming back to "snap, crackle, and pop." It's hard to do it better justice than that, beyond saying it sounds a lot like it does on TV, but louder, with a physicality from the sort of extreme chemical reactions necessary to take four humans and 4.5 million pounds and speed them up to Mach 25.
You have to wonder what it would have sounded like without the water sound suppression system present at the launch pad. As it was, the launch probably ranks as the third loudest display of speed and power I've witnessed; first place belongs to an SR-71 takeoff, closely followed by the start of a Formula 1 race. (And, before you rush to post, yes, I know, I was much closer to both of those and sound levels decrease logarithmically with distance.)
Atlantis moved much faster than I expected; the iconic footage of Saturn V launches in slow motion may have created a false expectation. Within a matter of seconds, the last Space Shuttle disappeared into the cloud layer and off to its final rendezvous with the International Space Station. I don't know whether it was seeing it in person, this being the final flight, or a combination of them both, but it was a deeply emotional moment.
Not as emotional as it was for one of my neighbors, crying with rage. Was she angry that a 30-year program ended with a fifteen second son et lumière? For the rest of us, the tears were a mix of joy and sorrow. Joy at seeing humans tear off into space on a pillar of flame, sorrow that this chapter was reaching an end.
There's been a lot of noise about the role of the journalists recently, sparked by articles from Jose Vargas and Mac McLelland. Various members of the press have told the rest of the pack that they have no place being anything other than utterly objective and dispassionate. The enthusiasm of the crowd at the media center pokes big holes in this argument, and it was something I don't have a problem with. It's possible that some of the people covering this launch were jaded with the whole thing but, if so, I didn't meet any.
A week ago, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to write about Atlantis' launch. It was going to be about a trip to watch the last Space Shuttle take its last bow, but also a piece about echoes across time, from the America Tom Wolfe captures in The Right Stuff. An America just beginning to surf the technological wave that would carry us to the moon. Cape Canaveral was the setting for history-making events, events as significant as the earliest cave art or the first expeditions that spread humanity across the islands of the Pacific Ocean.
I had romantic notions about writing of ghosts from half a century ago, of men with thick rimmed glasses, short sleeves, and the serious air of those who understood the weight on their shoulders. Not just the lives of these men—because they were all men, until Sally Ride—but the very reputation of the nation lay intertwined with the fate of the space program. Ars Technica wasn't around back then, but had it been, I like to think that these scientists and engineers would have been our natural readership.
But I didn't meet any ghosts. For that, I'd have needed to take one of the tours from the Visitor Center out to the abandoned launch pads, relics of the space race. Instead, the last launch of the shuttle was like attending a retirement party, which in a way it was. There might not have been cake, but we did get a giant candle.
