Daddy had never seen a shuttle launch. It was one of those things that he has always wanted to do. One of their last trips down we went over to see the Kennedy Space Center, but there was no shuttle launch going on then. He works on the Redstone Arsenal writing software for a company that NASA has contracted work out to. He has tried several time to enter the drawing for tickets to go and see a launch, but never won any. Part of the reason that they kept the kids almost a month is so that Mother and Daddy could come down and try to see the final shuttle launch while they were here. We were worried that it wouldn't go off, but we got up early and made the drive over to Titusville, to sit along the bay and hope to see Atlantis's final flight.
Gary and I had driven over almost two years earlier to see Atlantis launch. It was a clear beautiful day, and Britt blogged about it. The launch on July 8th was totally different, it was cloudy, there had been alot of rain, and even with the zoom, the massive NASA structures looked hazy through the mist and fog. Unlike before, where Gary and I pulled off the road in a residential neighborhood and sat alone on the grass, there were tons of people and we actually needed to pay for parking.
I was nervous and excited, not sure if at the last moment they would call off the launch. Someone had a radio playing with the official chatter, and they finally began the countdown. As we said blast off, on the horizon you could see the smoke billowing up, and then the glow of all that fire, and the shuttle was off. We didn't see it long before it hit the clouds and was gone from sight. Mother saw it flash, and light up the clouds in thinner spots once after it disappeared from view, and like that the shuttle program that I followed and as a child dreamed of traveling to space in was over. As we sat there, clapping and cheering (why I'm not really sure, it's not like the astronauts could hear and appreciate us), the thunderous roar of the lift off, finally rolled across the bay to us around 13 miles away. All that was left to see was the huge plume of smoke, that was even then beginning to drift away.