It was beautiful and awe-inspiring, and I hope to see more space flights soon. Our future is up there.
Whether or not you believe all the
#JourneyToMars hype, no matter how
critical you might be of the
Space Launch System (SLS)—if you don't feel
something when you watch a rocket launch, please consult a medical professional, you freaking
Grinch.
I cried when Orion lifted off—even more than I did
when DeeAnn and I watched the STS-124 launch in May of 2008. Last Friday, when that
Delta IV Heavy hit its second launch window, I was standing less than three miles from the pad.
I felt the heat from the engines. For a moment, I honestly couldn't decide whether I should just watch the blurry scene through my tears, or blink and risk missing any of it.
Others in my
NASA Social group got brilliant recordings of the
EFT-1 launch—I didn't even try. Check out
our photo pool on Flickr, some of which I daresay rival NASA's official images:
Don't even get me started on how great our amateur videographers are:
And for a real treat, listen to
Danny Sussman's audio recording with headphones on:
But what I'm
really looking forward to is
Alison Wilgus' forthcoming comic about the event. Alison is a fantastic writer and artist, and she was one of my
Clarion West classmates this summer. It was a complete coincidence that we both got into this NASA Social—we live on opposite coasts, and I didn't even know she had applied until we were tweeting at each other about the movie
Interstellar and other space-related topics. Second-best
surprise ever!
Alison drew
a wonderful comic about her previous NASA Social rocket launch experience, the
Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-K (TDRS-K) launch in January of 2013. Incidentally, this is possibly my favorite single panel from that comic, because I'm a weirdo:
You can
read the entire comic on Alison's web site. And if you enjoy it,
sign up for Alison's newsletter to get updates on her future projects!
I don't have much more to say about my NASA Social week. It was amazing, informative, and incredibly inspirational. I brought back some souvenirs, but nothing compares to the indelible memory of seeing that rocket rise from the ground and disappear into the clouds.
One. More. Time:
If you have a couple of hours to spare, I recommend watching
our Orion pre-launch briefing, which was video-conferenced between several NASA facilities around the country and included a lot of great information. My fellow NASA Social attendees asked some excellent questions about the future of America's space program.
Finally, I threw together a slide show of my own photos from last week. They're neither spectacular nor comprehensive, but should give you an idea of what the trip was like:
I was born after the Apollo missions ended. No people have walked on the Moon in my lifetime. I hope I live long enough to see human beings land on Mars. I really do.
