joshua wilsher

Rocket Man!

C-SPAN, a cable television network dedicated to airing non-stop coverage of government proceedings and public affairs programming, is generally quite boring. However, the usual documentation of local zoning proceedings and other such dull content was interrupted today by NASA-TV and their endeavour to launch the Discovery Shuttle from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida (This is only the second launch since Columbia's accident in 2003). Today, July 4th, was to be their third attempt after bad weather had cancelled planned launches on Saturday and Sunday.

At approximately 2.38pm (some 37 minutes ago), I watched it take off. While environmental issues were on my mind as smoke billowed from the rocket launcher, I was totally captivated by the sheer enormity of the exercise. For the first 10 minutes of the flight, a camera mounted to one of the fuel tanks captured the spacecrafts ascent from earth. After 2 minutes the booster had used up its fuel and was seperated (apparently after the deployment of parachutes it is retrived from the ocean). After 8 minutes, the external fuel tank was jettisoned (and apparently burns up as it reenters the atmosphere). As the camera was attached to this external tank, the coverage ended as the shuttle straightened up its position and headed towards the International Space Station, travelling on at over 8 kms per second. Moments later the screen went to colour bars. Yeah, space travel!

posted by Joshiesmoov @ 3:09 PM