The Sky's the Limit

Our next adventure included a rocket launch!  As a kid growing up in the 60s, astronauts were my heroes.  I remember my sisters and I sitting in front of the television set watching the moon landing and oohing and aahing over the fuzzy transmissions from space.  It seemed such a glorious and heroic calling and always seemed so magical.

Because of our schedule of going in the ICW and out for ocean legs, we were going to be just in time for the launch of the Orion, which is a capsule being sent up to test extreme speeds and radiation and heat for a hopeful trip to Mars some day.  While the space program has come under fire in recent years for all the money used to do these tests, it is still one of the most exciting things related to science for me.

The launch was scheduled for 7:05am the next morning, so I turned in early, excited for this new experience.  Bleary eyed and a little chilly, the next morning we sent Elliott up the mast in the bosun's chair to give him a better view.  7:05 came and went, first with a boat being in the launch zone, then high wind delays, and then finally a technical delay which scrubbed the launch for that day. 

Disappointed, we settled in for a relaxing day, with long naps, some reading, and general boat organizing.  Elliott had hoped to get together with the crew of Azimuth, but they were in the Banana River, where they had an even better view of the launch site.

The next expected launch time was for the same time the next morning, but there was a huge bank of fog expected to roll in with clearing not due to after 10:00am.  We sure hoped the mission would not get scrubbed a second time.

Before dawn the next day, I woke up, excited for the hope of a good launch.  Our boat had turned with the current, so all three of us sat up on the bow watching this time.  Elliott scrapped the idea of the bosun's chair as it was pretty uncomfortable and really didn't make a difference for the height.  As the time drew near and no delays were announced, I set up my camera and focused on the gantry, which was all I could really see.

A few more seconds, then I saw a light and started snapping.  I'm glad I had the viewfinder up to my eye because it made it seem even closer than we were.  I just snapped away, doing a time lapse, as the rocket ignited and climbed higher and higher into the sky.  Unfortunately, there was a low cloud hanging over the launch site, so we lost site of the Orion pretty quickly, though those few seconds before it disappeared were incredibly awesome! 

You may think this silly, but I kept flashing back not only to the real moon landings, but the television show, "I Dream of Jeannie," which was about an astronaut who crash landed somewhere in Turkey (I think) and found a bottle on the beach, rubbed it (of course) and out comes a foreign-language speaking genie.  Major Nelson and Jeannie (as she became to be known) were a large part of my early television viewing back in the day and I hated to miss the show.  So while being an astronaut was never a career choice of mine, watching the space program grow and develop has been a joy and since I try to enlighten my son to all the cultural icons of my growing-up years, you can bet that "I Dream of Jeannie" is going to be in our viewing future.