This past Monday, we all watched the space shuttle Endeavour lift of at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for STS-123.
Jamie, Jim & Marie drove down, and I followed two days later by air to Orlando. After they picked me up at the airport, we drove straight to the KCS visitors center, which stayed open past the usual 6pm closing time till 4am Tuesday morning for the 2:28 am launch.
We went through the various exhibits and museums,
saw the Mission to Mars show (which Grayson had a starring role in!) and rode
the Space Shuttle Launch Experience, which was really neat.
We took a bus tour over the the Apollo/Saturn V exhibit near the Vehicle Assembly Building,
and got to see the astronauts actually riding out to the launch pad in their silver van (shown here).
For the actual launch we stayed on the lawn
at the visitors center where we watched the launch on the big screen TV - we didn't actually see the shuttle until it cleared the trees, and then only for a few seconds till it went into the cloud cover. This picture is actually really close to what we saw -
the glare from the flame was so bright you couldn't see the actual shuttle, and clouds swallowed it up just after this picture was taken. We then loaded up for the three hour drive back to Orlando (it took two hours to go the first ten miles). We got to the hotel at 6am, and then I got up at 10 to go catch the flight back to Texas.
Great, great experience, and thanks to everyone at the KSC visitors center that made it such an enjoyable experience.