Early Friday morning, Jamie and I loaded up the car with cooler, chairs, beach clothes and whatever else we thought we might need on the way out the door and made the 140-mile trek to Cape Canaveral on the east coast to see the space shuttle lift off. It’s a trip we’ve made several times now.
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Our first voyage, we were out of the house in the wee hours with the parents in tow to see the last launch of the shuttle Endeavour. Mum and dad have seen a number of launches, including a night launch that remains as their favorite. Back in the day, they would drive over to Titusville in their motorhome and park up with other shuttle spotters in their self-sufficient worlds on wheels. There is a whole subculture of rocket launch watchers in Florida. They will lay out their credentials flight by flight if you have the time and patience to listen. But this time we were making the journey in Traveller, our trusty Ford Taurus. The crowd estimates were expected near 300,000 for the penultimate launch and reading stories of the traffic headaches from the previous last launch of Discovery in February, it seemed sensible to avoid Titusville, where the best views are, and try the approach through Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral. ![]()
We were scanning the area news stories and the Brevard County website for road closures and tips when Jamie remembered that he had a yo-yo contact on Facebook who lived in Cape Canaveral. We were on my poor husband like a pack of hungry dogs, urging him to contact Bradley for information on where to park, perhaps even at Bradley’s family’s house. As so often happens in the yo-yo world, Bradley came through like a star. He gave us directions to his house, saying there was an extra parking spot we could use, and told us where we could meet him on the beach a block away. He said there was a small parking lot where we could unload gear at beachside and we might even get a spot there if we were early. We couldn’t believe our luck.
We arrived in Cape Canaveral around 6:30am. The launch was scheduled for 8:56am. After getting slightly turned around , during which we saw a beautiful sunrise, we found the lot at the beach, parked up and lugged chairs and gear out onto the beach. Looking north,
we could see the largest buildings of the Kennedy Space Center and what might be the launch pad. Bradley and his brother were yo-yoing nearby and Jamie was soon throwing yo yo with a champion thrower. Bradley’s family had moved to the Cape only a few months earlier so this was to be his first shuttle launch. Mum was straight off down the beach looking for shells. Dad was trying out the video camera we had brought with us from Texas and the driver, me, plopped herself into a chair for a short nap.
The weather did a 180-degree turn and within the hour there was a howling wind off the water and dark clouds galore. It began to spit rain. Bradley and his brother said they were going back to their house for some jackets and left. Mum returned from her walk with the information that the shuttle would launch from a different area of the Kennedy Space Center complex . We wouldn’t see lift-off from the beach That explained why there were no crowds of people camping out. As we had the time to make a move, we decided to try getting a bit closer to the launch site and toted everything back to the car. Jamie texted Bradley a thank you and we were off.
We ended up on the Bennett Causeway with loads of people, including the mobile emergency unit for Brevard County. The makeshift parkinglot/campground was not more than a bit of field filled with RVs and autos. Enterprising locals had set up stands selling watermelons, Italian ices, baked goods, hot dogs and t-shirts. Mum and dad stayed in the car out of the wind while Jamie and I looked for a spot to set up our chairs near the water. Though the launch pad was 13 miles away, we were assured we would have a good view of the shuttle’s lift off. We set up our chairs and settled in to wait with the growing crowd.
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The mood was jovial. People told stories about launches they had seen and reminisced about the US space program. One guy in his late 40s latched on to us and said he was in town to catch a cruise ship out of Port Canaveral tomorrow. It was a bonus to have a shuttle launch while he waited. He said he needed a vacation because he worked with his brother and sometimes just needed to get away from him. He asked Jamie to take some photos of him as mementos of the day. Oddly, he asked for one photo to be of him near a news crew that was interviewing people who had come out for the launch though the reporter didn’t interview him. He was a character and we laughed when we got home and looked at Jamie’s own shots of the day because the guy, whose name we never got, ended up being in several of them.
As the launch time neared, news spread through the crowd that lift-off was being pushed back several hours due to technical problems. Again consulting the parents, we decided to just stay and see what happened. Jamie and I watched dolphins and pelicans feeding in the bay. We eavesdropped on conversations while the wind blew fine beach sand into our eyes and every crevice or fold of skin. Near 1:00pm NASA scrubbed the launch due to further technical troubles. Ah the best laid plans of mice and space men. We drove the 140 miles home.
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It was a nutty coincidence that the following day we had to drive to Melbourne, just 25 miles short of Cape Canaveral, so Jamie could attend the Florida State Yo-Yo Championship. He didn’t intend to compete but ended up in a funny novice competition to see who could make their yo yo spin the longest and he won. The prize was, of course, a yo yo! He did a lot of schmoozing and as the contest was held in a mall, I did a little shopping. It was a great day.
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We loaded up the parents once again when Endeavour’s launch was re-scheduled. With a better idea of what to expect, we left not quite so early, found a good spot on the causeway, enjoyed the camaraderie of the crowd and watched the shuttle go up. Because of the low cloud cover, we could see the rockets for about five seconds and then it disappeared. That was it. And I had missed most of those five seconds trying to find the shuttle on the screen of my camera for a photo.The whole thing seemed anti-climactic but Jamie had a big smile on his face and said most joyfully, “We just saw a space ship take off.” There was little point in trying to get out into the flood of cars leaving the area so we stayed in our chairs for a while looking across the bay at Kennedy Space Center. President Obama and the first family had been in attendance at the scrubbed launch but not this one. Seats in the viewing stands at the space center had sold out months ago for the final launches. Our contemplation was interrupted by the sound of an impatient driver far back in the line of traffic laying on his horn. As a pair of motorcycle cops drove by we heard one of think sternly aloud “Blow that horn one more time…” Everyone within earshot started laughing. We had lunch at a British theme pub, spent a few hours at the beach ,which was swarmed with dreaded love bugs, and again headed for home this time with a shuttle launch to our credit.
I encountered Endeavor again a week and a half later when she re-entered the earth’s atmosphere. A sonic boom occurs as the shuttle zips through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound. If you are near the shuttle's path, you will actually hear two sonic booms. NASA states that one sonic boom is generated by the shuttle's nose; the other by its tail. Prior to the sonic boom, you will see an orange streak with a bright white tail if skies are clear. I fairly leapt out of bed from the unexpected noise and checked our dark house for signs of something having blown up or a parent having fallen in the night. It wasn’t until I mentioned it to the folks at breakfast that I learned I had heard Endeavour as she flew over the area on her path home to Cape Canaveral. How very cool.
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As Jamie, Traveller and I sped east towards Atlantis Friday morning full of petrol and coffee, I had a lot on my mind. Mum and dad were safely in Maine, having arrived Thursday night for their summer season as snowbirds with friends and family. I had given my notice at work and was now once again unemployed. I’d become a space shuttle groupie and the words my sweet husband had spoken at Endeavour’s launch resonated in my head. We were going to see a space ship take off. After years of watching Star Trek and Star Wars, and Dr. Who with his little blue police call box that’s bigger on the inside, it was finally sinking in that yes, we were going to watch a space ship take off and with its final mission bring to a close this chapter of manned space flights. I realized how little I’ve paid attention to an achievement that is pretty darn amazing when you stop to think about it.
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I couldn’t tell you when the shuttle program started and what the first shuttle was called without doing a search on the internet. According to NASA, President Nixon formally proposed a reusable space transportation system in January of 1972. The first shuttle was originally planned to be named Constitution, but a massive write-in campaign from Star Trek fans convinced the White House to change the name to Enterprise. President Ford said he was partial to the name Enterprise as he had served aboard a Navy ship in the Pacific that had serviced the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Ford told NASA to change the name. (As an aside, as I followed a research thread to check the accuracy of the story about the Trekkies and the write-in campaign, the document used in a Wikipedia thread was a scanned copy of a page from the Sept 6, 1976 issue of The Lewiston Sun Journal of all newspapers—the Sun Journal being a paper from Lewiston, Maine. The story was an Associated Press story. Funny!) Enterprise went on to be the shuttle from which its sisters were all born, the Henrietta Lacks of the shuttle program.
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I can tell you I was sitting in a lecture room on the USM campus in Portland waiting for my music history class to begin when students started arriving saying that the shuttle Challenger had exploded during launch on that January 28th in 1986. It seemed like a bad joke until Professor Bowdren arrived and confirmed that the shuttle had exploded, killing everyone onboard including Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire school teacher whom all of New England had embraced when she was chosen as the first teacher astronaut in the Teacher in Space Project. We spent some time talking about the space program and its future then Prof Bowdren let us go. He’d pick up with class next week.
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I am ashamed to admit that as I did a search to find out where the shuttle Columbia is now, I was stunned to learn it had disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere on February 1st, 2003. As I read articles about the disaster, bits of memory returned. When I moved to Texas, the name
Nacogdoches seemed familiar. I couldn’t recall why but as I looked at film footage of the debris field, I remembered the numerous interviews that had come from Nacogdoches in the days following the tragedy and strange way the word Nacogdoches felt in my mouth. Memory is such a delicate thing.
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We arrived at Bennett Causeway to find the place rammed with people at eight o’clock in the morning waiting for the final countdown for Atlantis. We parked far down the causeway and walked to a spot near a bridge perhaps half a mile from where we had watched Endeavour launch. People were sat in chairs on the roadside, balanced on guardrails, spread out on blankets on the banking and high a-top big RV’s. There was no shortage of updates thanks to cell phones and radios. Cameras with massive telescopic zoom lenses were trained on a spot far out at the horizon. Binoculars were passed back and forth. It didn’t matter who you were, what you looked like or where you came from, so long as you were not blocking anyone’s view we were all just citizens of the planet here to send our love and good wishes to the Atlantis crew and be part of history.
A flotilla of watercraft bobbed in the small bay before us. There was a no-go zone being enforced by the Coast Guard keeping boats a defined distance from the launch area. A pair of manatees came to view the gathering, surfacing over and over to the delight of the crowd. During prescribed minutes prior to launch, fighter jets patrolled the airspace, gathering climate information that was being sent to the command center according to several seasoned spectators who were near us.
And then the final few seconds of the countdown. Everyone looked to the horizon. Someone with a camera announced, “There’s the steam clouds!” and suddenly we had lift off. Even from 13 miles away, we could see the billowing clouds of white against the distant gray and then the deep orange glow of the rockets forcing themselves and Atlantis skyward. There was awe-inspired silence and then applause. Then more silence from the crowd as the sound of the rockets moved across the water towards us and we watched Atlantis climb higher and higher, through a layer of clouds and into another patch of blue sky, her rockets still blazing, finally disappearing above another layer of clouds.
There was a final round of applause and then that was that. Some kept watching the sky, watching the exhaust plume spread out across the blue as upper level winds caught hold. Others dashed to their cars,hoping to get on the highway ahead of the exodus. Jamie and I stood by the guardrail holding on to each other, smiling. We had just seen a space ship take off, the last of her kind.
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Godspeed, Atlantis. May we all make it home safely.
(As for the sushi mentioned in the title, we had lunch at Cocoa Beach Thai & Sushi and it was amazing! If you find yourself on the Space Coast, get your sushi here! Oh, and most of the photos in this blog are sadly not ours. Most are from NASA, some are from news agencies and they are images I found through Google)
