Nasa Launch: Watch Live

[SID210SA]

Click link http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/sts115_front/index.html then click on watch nasa tv

[SID210SA]

8 minutes till launch!

[CRUZTAKER]

Gage is watching his first launch.

Currently 230 nm up. :up:

[martyo]

Simply put: Bad Ass!

Barry: I can remember as a kid watching all the Apollo launches. My Dad would even wake us up for the middle of the night launches.

Damn, 7000 miles an hour is fast, I don't car who ya are!

[CRUZTAKER]

Damn, 7000 miles an hour is fast, I don't car who ya are!

I remember seeing the speedo surpass 5,500 FEET per second...
I closed my eyes after that.:D

[DEFYANT]

I missed the launch :(

But I watch this stuff anyway since you posted the first thread.

Thanks again!

[martyo]

I remember seeing the speedo surpass 5,500 FEET per second...
I closed my eyes after that.:D


:D ........

[Donny Carlson]

Mainly because there are just so many more Shuttles left to fly before the Orion program takes over, and I think those shots are not going to be as awesome as a Shuttle launch.

I was there on May 13, 1973 for the launch of Skylab. This was the last Saturn V launch vehicle to fly, and having not been to any Apollo launches, the last time to experience the amazing power of that launch vehicle.

The previous year or so NASA had sent out across the US to high schools invitations for students to submit ideas for an experiment to fly on one of the Skylab missions. It had to be interesting, of scientific value, and self contained. I entered an experiment and made the first two cuts, but my experiment was not one of the finalists or was selected to fly. (My experiment was about observing flying insects in zero gravity to see if they orientated their flight to correspond with microgravity. There were two other experiments similar to this, both were rejected, though one that observed a spider spinning a web was green lighted and flew).

As one of the "chosen" semi-finalists, I was given an invitation to observe the launch and get some behind the scenes tours. This was an especially historic launch not only because of the Saturn V launch vehicle, but for the first time there would be two launches in two days, as the crew was to fly up the next day in an Apollo sitting on a Saturn 1-b.

The tours were back in the day when a lot of Apollo hardware was still in place, and before the visitor center was farmed out to a company to run. We got to visit the Redstone launch complex Shepherd flew out of, went to both pads (the Skylab and S1B pads) the day before the launch, got a long, long but amazing tour of the VAB and launch control.

The day of the launch I had a special pass that got our car parked right by the VAB, and the observation area was in front of the press gallery. I stood right next to the crawl way in front of the VAB the day of the launch.

The launch itself was very exciting. The ground shook, the air was like being next to a swarm of helicopters, it chopped and popped and you could actually feel the warmth of the rocket blast inthe wind. I'll never forget it.

We never got to see the other launch, because on the way up the solar panels opened up, tearing one off and jepordising the mission. It was some time afterward that the crew actually went up, and I watched the launch from home by then.

To bookend this, when I was at Rice two years later, NASA invited experiment submitters to Johnson Space Center for a gathering. This was after all the Skylab flights were over and NASA was going to move the training and support hardware out of JSC to storage and muesum space. The group I was with got to go inside the 1:1 training mockup of Skylab which was TRES cool. I gotta picture somewhere of a friend of mine along with me that day standing in front of the Skylab toilet. Har-de-har-har. Next coolest part was sitting in mission control. There were actually two mission control rooms, one on a floor above the other. One was used for Skylab, the other was left over from the Apollo program and was just like it was the last day they used it. Again, I got a cool pic of the console the dude sat at (range safety control officer) that would push the Destruct button should something go horribly wrong and a Saturn V /Apollo veer off course and head for a a habitated location. That was something that never really got publicised back in the day, though it was assumed that the crew would have used the escape tower to pull Apollo away before the big boom. My question was what would happen if the crew were unable to fire the escape tower, or there was some malfunction of the escape system. Answer: Destruct anyway even if it meant loss of the crew. Whoa.

Anyway, check it out. It's well worth the trip.


I was here and saw this in person:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/96/Skylab_launch_on_Saturn_V.jpg/481px-Skylab_launch_on_Saturn_V.jpg (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Skylab_launch_on_Saturn_V.jpg)

[martyo]

^^^^ WOW! That sounds cool!