Friends in high places

CNN Interactive writer shares VIP view of launch

January 22, 1998
Web posted at: 10:45 p.m. EST (0345 GMT)

At the invitation of astronaut Andy Thomas, CNN Interactive writer Kristin Lemmerman was in Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of space shuttle Endeavor.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida (CNN) -- Here I am, chewing my nails and checking the weather every 30 minutes in the hope that the overcast skies along Florida's "Space Coast" will suddenly clear and Andy will be off to the Russian space station Mir before I have to head back to work.

I've watched a lot of launches on TV, but up to now, I've seen only one in person, in 1996. And that only because Andy, who endured my piano playing when I was a little kid, decided that my family was, in a sense, also his.

When I first met Andy, he wasn't an astronaut. I was 7 or 8 years old, and he was my engineer father's Australian co-worker, a bearded guy who came over to our house to fiddle around in my dad's woodworking shop, tinker with broken-down sports cars and, sometimes, when he couldn't go back to Australia for the holidays, join us for Thanksgiving dinner.

Family visits a major event

Watching a space shuttle launch as a family member is a major event. Remember the launch depicted in "Apollo 13," where a few astronauts' wives gathered on some bleachers to watch Tom Hanks and company blast off? It's not really like that. Instead, family members check in at Kennedy Space Center the day before the launch, get a briefing from an astronaut, and take a bus tour of the center (if you catch the early tour, you actually get to say hello to the crew in person).

The day of the launch, some 200 people meet at a remote location and board tour buses to the launch site, where we hang out for a couple of hours with a couple hundred engineers and assorted aerospace VIPs, and hope the space shuttle blasts off on time. The viewing site is a little more than 3 miles from the shuttle -- straight across from it, but on the opposite bank of the Banana River.

It's a long way away, but you wouldn't want to be any closer. The rumble of the burning fuel, so poorly reproduced on TV, is so loud that you can feel it pounding in your chest, so strong that it stirs up waves in the river that wash up on our side. And as the shuttle slowly rises from its massive platform, the growing column of flame beneath it is nearly blinding in its intensity. Everyone cheers -- and then collectively, falls silent as we all wait to see if the rockets' precisely choreographed dance will go smoothly this time.

When we arrive at the mission briefing Wednesday morning, the IMAX theater where it's held is already two-thirds full, and people who haven' t seen each other in many missions are seat-hopping so they can visit. A few minutes later, a NASA astronaut arrives to bring us up to date.

'It's a great ride'

Robert L. Curbeam Jr. wasn't going on this flight -- his next scheduled trip to space is for summer 1999 -- but he knows everyone on our mission, sharing his insider knowledge as he introduces each crew member via slide show.

He met STS-89's pilot, Joe Frank Edwards Jr., when they were both in flight training; he ribs mission specialist James Reilly for his Idaho birthplace ("Who's from Idaho, really?" he jokes) and he dubs the multi-degreed Bonnie Dunbar an "official smart person" and an "old-timer" as well, since she was entering the space program about the time he graduated from high school.

Someone asks Curbeam what it's like to be on the inside as the shuttle lifts off. "It's a great ride," he says. "It feels like you're at a stop sign, then seven seconds before you go you feel a rumbling underneath you. You can't see anything, but you can feel it."

Then, he says, it feels "like a Mack truck just hit you from behind" as you go from a standstill to Mach 4 in seven seconds. You have to force yourself to breathe until you reach orbital speed, he said.

It is not a particularly appealing thought, but apparently it's worth it. "I wish I was going on this launch," Curbeam says. "Every astronaut wishes they were going on every launch."

Glimpsing space stars

The tour of the grounds that follows the briefing is fascinating. The shuttle has to be transported to the launch pad on a gigantic machination on tank-style wheels that can only go a mile an hour -- and rarely goes that fast. That crawler is so heavy that a special road, with twin tracks 20 feet wide filled with eight feet of gravel, had to be built to accommodate it.

It travels alongside a road lined with miles of pipes holding gaseous nitrogen, and the road runs through the middle of a wildlife refuge (the bus slows down several times while our tour guide scouts out several of the local alligators' usual sunning spots). When the shuttle launches it burns two 500,000-gallon tanks of fuel -- one liquid hydrogen, the other, liquid oxygen -- to become airborne.

Blastoff generates so much heat and flame that, in spite of a massive flame trench and several deflectors within the trench, the grass hundreds of feet from the launch pad is scorched, as is the fence.

Despite these superhuman statistics, everyone seems to have the same question: Is the launch going to go up on schedule? Not many of us can afford to hang around past the weekend; we're all using vacation days to make this launch, and some of us traveled a long way. Some of Andy's relatives came from Australia to see him off, and there is also a strong contingent for cosmonaut Salizhan Shakirovich Sharipov.

When we meet the astronauts at Launch Pad A, where the shuttle is already loaded and in position, Sharipov's family is easy to pinpoint -- their somber, dark suits contrast with the American families' jeans and T-shirts.

Our visit is brief. The astronauts, all in quarantine, stand on an embankment and we hold our loud conversations from the edge of the street, 15 feet away. Only a few people, earlier awarded NASA's clean bill of health, are able to cross the quarantine line.

Then the crew departs. The talk turns to the weather, and if the shuttle will launch on time. The forecast calls for clouds, but a woman who works at Mission Control in Houston says they only need a little clearing -- a 10-minute window -- to go ahead. She has seen launches go through a break in the clouds with no problem.

So my T-shirt, emblazoned with the STS-89 logo, is laid out for Thursday evening. I flip the TV back to NASA's channel every 30 minutes, just to see if they have news on the launch status sooner than they said they would.

And in between biting my nails, I'm keeping my fingers crossed, hoping for that 10-minute window to appear and let me see one of my family's oldest friends off into space.

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