Two locals attend the space shuttle’s launch in Cape Canaveral, as Discovery’s final flight winds down an era of space exploration

Space Shuttle Discovery, officially called Orbital Vehicle 103, the oldest remaining, most used, highest mileage spaceship ever built, was scheduled for takeoff from Launch Site 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday, Feb. 24 at 4:50 p.m. Discovery’s final mission would exemplify the space shuttle program: to haul up and install two of the final components of the International Space Station 220 miles above Earth. After two more missions over the next few months by NASA’s other two remaining shuttles, Endeavor and Atlantis, the Space Shuttle Program will come to an end, and the United States will no longer have any means of launching manned spaceflights beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

We had the privilege of watching Discovery lift off for its final mission from the Launch 39 Press Site—the very spot where, in 1967, at the Apollo 4 maiden launch of a Saturn V rocket, Walter Cronkite had commented, “Our building’s shaking here...the floor is shaking...this big glass window is shaking, we’re holding it with our hands!”

Before the final countdown began, we had a chance to wander the grounds and soak up our nation’s long history of space exploration.

the race to space

The space shuttle program was “launched” with Columbia’s maiden voyage in 1981—20 years to the day after Russian Yuri Gregarin rocketed into the blue to become the first man in space, and 12 years after NASA astronauts first stepped foot on the moon. 

The history of American space flight up to that point had been singularly focused around that grand achievement of going to the moon, starting with President Kennedy’s famous 1961 speech about “achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” 

For the rest of the 1960s, NASA worked to design, engineer and build more and more capable spacecrafts. It began with Project Mercury, which launched a man into suborbital flight for less than 20 minutes, and culminated 15 manned missions later on July 20, 1969, on the 11th Apollo mission. That’s when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on the moon’s surface after riding from Earth atop a Saturn V rocket—the most powerful rocket ever built by humankind.

After the first moonwalk, NASA sent five more missions to the lunar surface and 10 more men walked on the moon. They took rock samples and soil samples and brought back lunar material to further analyze on Earth. We walked, ran, bounded, leaped and drove on the moon, and New Hampshire’s own Alan Shepard smuggled a pocketful of golf balls in his space suit, modified a lunar sample handle, attached a six-iron head, and stroked a few lunar golf drives. On Dec. 7, 1972, Eugene Cernan climbed back up the ladder to his lunar module, becoming the last person to walk on our celestial satellite.

a new mission

Two years later, in 1974, construction began on a new fleet of “space shuttles.” It would take seven years until the first shuttle actually launched. As opposed to everything that had come before, these new orbiters were reusable vehicles equipped with expansive cargo-carrying capacity and powerful enough to rocket more than 17,000 miles per hour into near Earth orbit, but not capable of making it to the moon or leaving Earth’s orbit. For almost 40 years now, the moon has shone silently above our night sky, out of reach of man.

Space shuttles are powered by three main engines and two solid rocket boosters, each measuring just over 149 feet long (two feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty) and packed with enough aluminum powder, ammonium perchlorate, HB polymer, iron oxide and an epoxy currying agent to give them a combined weight of 1,303,314 pounds at liftoff (three times the weight of Lady Liberty). Once lit, there is no way to stop the rocket boosters. Each one provides approximately 3.3 million pounds of thrust. After their fuel is spent (about two minutes after liftoff), the explosive bolts holding them are detonated, and both boosters fall back to Earth and parachute into the Atlantic Ocean, where they are retrieved, refurbished, and reused up to 20 times. 

The big orange external tank attached to the underside of the shuttle is filled by 500,000 gallons of super cold liquefied hydrogen (-423 degrees) and liquid oxygen (-297 degrees) in two separate internal tanks. These liquid propellants are combined in the main combustion chamber, where the temperature rises to 6,000 degrees, hotter than the boiling point of iron. More than a million pounds of propellants are completely burned up over the first 8.5 minutes of a mission before the external tank, too, is jettisoned and disintegrates as it falls back to Earth. It’s the only non-recyclable element of the shuttle system.Discovery is the oldest of the three remaining shuttles in NASA’s fleet. Challenger and Columbia were lost in launch and landing tragedies in 1986 and 2003, respectively.

Discovery is a workhorse and has been the go-to shuttle of the fleet. Since its maiden voyage on Aug. 30, 1984, it has flown the most missions of any space shuttle or any spaceship ever built (39 including this final mission). It has carried the most crew members into space (246) and orbited Earth 5,628 times. Its odometer, when it returns to Earth after nearly two weeks in space, will read 147.4 million miles. It is the space shuttle that launched the Hubble telescope in April 1990 and returned to service it in 1997. It is the first spaceship ever to be piloted by a woman (Eileen Collins in 1995), and it has carried the oldest person to space (Sen. John Glen). It made the final dock with the space station Mir and linked up with the International Space Station 13 times. After both the loss of Challenger and then Columbia, Discovery was chosen as the Return to Flight shuttle. And, after this, its final mission, it will be the first space shuttle to retire.

Space Transportation System 133:Feb. 24, 2011

Our observation area, the LC-39 Press Site, is set up on a raised mound on the west bank of the turning basin just south of the Vehicle Assembly Building, the tallest one-story building in the world. It’s a little more than three miles west of the two launch sites where every shuttle mission starts, the best seat in the house to watch a shuttle take off (the “house” being all of planet Earth). It has been a National Historic Site since 1974, and its countdown clock and flagpole were added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 2000. 

Walking through the news center on launch day is awe-inspiring, with rows of media representatives from around the world, press materials, live television feeds, and press conferences. Outside, the large lawn slowly fills up with reporters, photographers, veteran newsmen, engineers, PR people, astronauts and a shiny, human-like robot. The 80-degree weather, with a gentle breeze blowing across the turning basin, bodes well for the launch. A scattering of low clouds drifted lazily on our western horizon, firmly held away from the coastal launch site by a pleasant sea breeze. 

Discovery’s final mission had originally been scheduled for September 2010, then early November, when it was scrubbed for a variety of technical and weather-related reasons. This February date had slowly emerged as a reality when the preferred weeklong January 2011 window began to present issues. The week leading up to the launch went smoothly, with officials saying the launch date still looked good. 

We had set up a tripod in the front row by the water, as close as possible to the launch pad. Throughout the day, we had been visited by all kinds of wildlife. In the morning, a pair of dolphins swam 15 feet past the spot we had staked out. An hour later, a manatee basked at the surface just offshore. Pelicans glided by on a regular basis, a flock of turkey vultures soared on thermal breezes high in the air, osprey sought out prey, and a pair of 10-foot-long alligators twice made a slow circuit of the turning basin, motoring by 20 feet from our toes. Above our heads, a NASA helicopter made loops throughout the afternoon.

Up the lawn, in front of a pair of bleachers for reporters and photographers, NASA and General Motors showed off their latest joint-venture offspring, Robonaut 2. It’s a carbon copy of the humanlike robot member of the shuttle mission crew that was already safely stowed aboard Discovery, waiting to be permanently installed at the Space Station. This R2 was attached at the waist to a four-wheel all-terrain rover, and he worked hard demonstrating his dexterous capabilities, working out with 20-pound barbells, and zipping around the lawn, controlled by exuberant engineers via a high-tech joystick. 

Mission specialist Tim Kopra spent the entire day at the media site as a consolation prize for not getting strapped into a seat on Discovery. Kopra was to be a mission specialist and lead spacewalker on this mission, but had to trade his space suit for a pair of crutches when he broke his hip in a bicycle accident in January.

As the afternoon wore on, our solitary tripod above the water’s edge was joined by several other cameras. Shuttle launch windows are extremely short and precise. The International Space Station is orbiting Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour. The shuttle’s maximum velocity is roughly 17,500 mph, and once it drops its rocket boosters and external tank and enters orbit, it has limited means to catch a satellite. The window for a Feb. 24 launch was only a few minutes: from 4:50 to 4:53 p.m.

With less than 10 minutes to go until launch, NASA Launch Control Center in Cape Canaveral realized there was a problem with a range computer responsible for tracking the shuttle after liftoff. The problem triggered an automatic “no go,” which needed to be cleared before the shuttle launch could proceed. Several tense minutes went by until, with 40 seconds before the launch window would close, Mike Moses, chair of the Mission Management Team, got word that the launch could proceed. A flurry of activity down the chain of command followed, culminating with the throwing of the switch that lifted the hold on the launch and resumed the countdown with just two seconds left. At a post-launch press meeting, Mr. Moses quipped, “We had about two seconds of hold time remaining, which is about one more second than I needed to get the job done, so it was plenty of margin.”

Finally, with 40 seconds left in the launch window, the announcement came in. “It’s a go,” one photographer screamed, and the entire line of media personnel along the turning basin erupted with cheers. Reporters and photographers who had maintained professionalism and poise throughout the day were now beginning to squeal with excitement.

Shuttle launches have an eerie beginning. Puffs of smoke began to emerge around the shuttle above the trees, and, aside from a flurry of camera clicks and shouts, Discovery began to lift off in utter silence. It took 14 seconds for the sound to reach us, and when it did, it was like no sound we had ever heard. The roar crackled and popped as the sound seemed to rip the fabric of the air around us. It grew in volume until it became so loud that it didn’t seem like noise anymore. In the minute leading up to launch, 300,000 gallons of water had been released beneath Discovery as part of a sound suppression system that kept the shuttle’s roar from tearing itself to pieces. It no longer seemed like idle boasting when NASA warned that within 800 feet of the launch pad the sound would kill you—if the caustic chemicals and fireballs didn’t get you first. 

The shockwave followed immediately after the sound. We had been warned that we would feel a breeze from the shockwave and be able to see it traveling toward us across the water, but the wave was like being pushed firmly over every square inch of your body from one specific direction, shaking cameras that were steadied by tripods and leaving us gasping for breath. When the sound and shockwave subsided, shouts and cheers were replaced by sighs, and “wow” was repeated softly on a hundred tongues like a mantra. 

Within two minutes, the shuttle was already 24 nautical miles up and traveling at more than 3,000 miles per hour. Three seconds later, the tiny dot of light that was Discovery became three separate glints as the spent rocket boosters tumbled away from the shuttle back toward Earth. 

The experience was powerful, exciting, and humbling. More than a million pounds of spent propellant created a billowing cloud that hung for miles in the air, and the shuttle threw a shadow in the late afternoon like a dark sword over the Atlantic Ocean. The words of NASA commentator George Diller hung poignantly in the air: “Discovery now making one last reach for the stars.” 

These may lack some of the might, grandeur and vision of a moon rocket. But watching, hearing, smelling, and sensing the launch from as close as possible is a thing of wonder and  unexpected beauty. We all stood quietly on shaky legs, marveling in the experience, wishing the astronauts well and pondering this blue marble we stand upon. Then we came back into our surroundings as a woman behind us on that grassy field by the lagoon said, “Does anyone need a cigarette?”