Opportunity 1

The orbiter Discovery made it! It was exciting to watch the launch and the landing. This shuttle mission was the first that I had seen from start to finish. I've been fighting for the past three years to see a mission start to finish. In that time, I had three opportunities:

1.
I was a new co-op here at NASA in the spring of 2003. We had all just finished four straight semesters of Speed and I had no clue what NASA did. Before my interview with NASA, I asked Adam what great things they had been doing since the moon. He stood in disbelief and asked if I had heard of the Space Station. "Nope!" "Are you kidding?" No I wasn't. I had no idea. Now that I think about, I did know they had space shuttles because I remember as a sophomore in high school sticking around at school after classes to watch the historic John Glenn launch. I felt that someone with more zeal for NASA, like Todd or Adam, should be the one interviewing. Thanks to Adam, he was able to explain the space station before my interview, enough to land me a job with the space station group in Florida.

I had been here at the job for about two weeks and I found myself groggy in the early morning riding a bus to a VIP viewing site to watch the Columbia launch. The sun rose; a beautiful day was born. It was sunny with hardly a cloud in the sky. Three hours later and three miles away, on January 16, 2003, I saw my first Shuttle launch. The shuttle went up and all that was heard were claps and cheers. The wave made its way across the lagoon where birds flew far and fast from their places of rest. The sky sounded like it was being ripped apart- a continuous Grand Finale at Thunder. What used to be on the ground was now in space.

Two weeks later, I awoke early on a Saturday morning to watch Columbia return from space. Fortunate for me, it would be returning right before my eyes. Tickets to watch the landing were abundant- it was just another landing of a shuttle on a Saturday morning. They said that the sonic booms would be loud- two, distinct explosions. With a count-down clock and three-mile long runway in front of me, this was certainly to be unlike any other plane landing I had ever seen.

"UHF comm check" they broadcasted over and over- waiting for an answer. They lost communication with the shuttle. The count-down clock reached zero with the runway empty. The shuttle was running late. We returned to the busses and I drove home. The news said it all: the shuttle wouldn't be landing in Florida today.