Shuttle Launch Video

Shuttle Launch

As my wife is at a Christmas cookie exchange party this evening, I'm taking the opportunity to watch an incredible video of Space Shuttle launch footage. It is some of the first public viewing of the 100+ engineering analysis cameras sitting all around the orbiter as it lifts off. The views are incredible: close-up to long-range, up to 400 frames per second capturing the stack as it moves away from the crawler and launch tower. It conveys the immense power of the solid rocket boosters and orbiter's own liquid-fueled rocket engines. Commentary is provided by a couple of program engineers. Probably the best shot of the whole thing happens at 30:51. It is a glamor shot, if you will, of the shuttle lift-off in real-time. You can see the boosters ignite, the flames shoot through the trench and redirect off to the side, and the whole vehicle move with alarming speed up toward its orbital destination.

I recently finished Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox. It is a well-researched and wonderfully detailed account of the way the USA landed on the moon. It takes the reader quickly from the beginning of NASA, at the time were laughed at and looked down upon by the Air Force ICBM engineers, into a look at how the moon mission was conceptualized and realized with emphasis on the engineering and mission control aspects. I recommend it.

In the end it is a shame to finish the book because we know what happens. We give up on extra-terrestrial exploration and settle for low earth orbit. In some sense we got as far as the moon and gave up. I reminds me of the Chinese period of maritime exploration in the early 1400's that was abruptly terminated under the Ming dynasty's isolationist policies. It is so easy, in retrospect, to see that the Chinese were giving up future political dominance to the Europeans who would soon embark on and the period of exploration and colonization of the new world and many parts of Asia as well. But to the Ming folks, this seemed like the most prudent way to maintain internal stability and peace. So to we, Americans as well as humans, have given up the mantle of exploration. No doubt it will be resumed, but for the last 40 years we have not even tread water.

Having said all this, there is still something romantic about the space travel. There is something awesome about a Shuttle launch. And it is sad to see a whole generation of space travel, dominated so by that machine, come to an end. It is time, or very nearly time, for the Shuttle to move into our fond memories. Reading Apollo, one of the most surprising facts was that Werner von Braun was still a key figure in the the NASA design process in the early stages of the Shuttle program. It was even before the last moon landing (Dec. 1972) that the Shuttle was conceptualized and RFPs put out to industry. Seeing that video footage is a reminder that the Shuttle is indeed an awesome vehicle, did indeed provide our nation with 30 years of space travel, and will be missed.

And, space travel is not dead. Satellites are launched with great regularity (though not *always* with success--just to remind us that rocket science still is difficult) and just this week the first successful commercial reentry took place. So space travel is far from dead. But what has been lost is the romanticism of the early days: the nation shocked by the overhead transit of Sputnik, then transfixed as John Glenn orbited the earth, the whole world rapt as Neil Armstrong stepped off Eagle and onto another world. Perhaps it is inevitable that this would go--as space turned from the final frontier to another place to make a few bucks. But we have not gone far in our solar system and we still possess the capacity to stand in collective awe as humans go where we have never been before.