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SHUTTLE LAUNCH VIEWING GUIDE Where to stand, when to get there, and what to bring from a lady who has been standing on the Titusville riverfront since 1981

*** 3... 2... 1... and LIFTOFF! *** Welcome to Wanda's page *** Go for launch! *** Bring a lawn chair! *** Scrubs happen, come back tomorrow! *** [ WHERE TO WATCH ] [ WHEN TO ARRIVE ] [ WHAT TO BRING ] [ SCRUBS ] [ NIGHT LAUNCHES ] [ THE SOUND ] [ MY LAUNCHES ] [ JOHN GLENN DAY ]

HI THERE, SPACE FANS! I'm Wanda Gilchrist and I live in Titusville, Florida, which if you don't know is the little town right across the Indian River from the Kennedy Space Center. My late husband Earl and I moved here in 1980, and on April 12, 1981, we walked down to the river with a thermos of coffee and watched Columbia go up on the very first Space Shuttle flight. I have been hooked ever since. I have seen more launches than I can count on all my fingers and toes (it's 58, I keep a list, see below) and I get asked all the time by visiting relatives, church friends and people at the diner: "Wanda, where should we go to see it?" So here it is, all in one place! This is a page for regular people who want to watch a launch. I'm not with NASA, I'm not an expert, I'm just a grandmother who has been doing this for eighteen years and made every mistake there is (forgot the bug spray, forgot the chairs, forgot the SUNSCREEN, went home too early, once, in 1985, and missed it by twenty minutes from the car. Never again.) A note about right now (September 1999): The fleet is having its wiring inspected after a problem on Columbia's July launch (more on that below, it was a doozy), so the next flight, which is supposed to go fix the Hubble telescope, keeps sliding on the calendar. Watch the news or call the Kennedy Space Center visitor complex before you make plans. When they announce a date, come on down!

WHERE TO WATCH The Shuttle launches from Pad 39A or 39B, way out on Merritt Island on the far side of the Indian River from Titusville. You can't get close: the closest the public gets is a few miles, and honestly a few miles is plenty. Here are the spots everybody uses. All of them are FREE unless I say otherwise. 1. The Titusville riverfront (my spot). Anywhere along U.S. 1 on the river in Titusville, from the parks downtown south along the water. Space View Park downtown has the Space Walk of Fame monuments and is the most popular; the little parks and the grassy shoulders up and down the river fill in after that. You are looking straight east across the river, about 12 miles from the pads, with NOTHING in the way. You see the pad, you see the ignition, you see the whole climb. This is also where the old-timers sit, so if you want to hear stories about Apollo, this is your spot. Get here EARLY (see below). Park downtown and walk. 2. The Max Brewer Causeway (State Road 406), the bridge from Titusville over to the island. People line up along the causeway on both sides. Great view, but you're standing on a road shoulder. Same distance as the riverfront. 3. The NASA Causeway (State Road 405) is the closest public viewing there is, about 6 or 7 miles, but you can't just drive on; the space center sells bus tickets through the visitor complex for causeway viewing and they sell out fast. If you can get one, DO IT. You feel the sound in your ribs there. 4. The Beachline / Bennett Causeway (State Road 528) between Cocoa and Merritt Island / Cocoa Beach. Folks pull off along the causeway over the Banana River. Good for people coming from Orlando who don't want to fight Titusville traffic. 5. Jetty Park at Port Canaveral. A county park at the port with a beach, a fishing pier and a campground. There's a small entry fee. You're south of the pads looking north up the coast, and the campground people set up days ahead. Nice because you can make a whole day of it with the kids. 6. The beaches: Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral along A1A. Farther, but pretty, and everybody on the beach cheers. Playalinda Beach, which is the closest beach to the pads, is CLOSED for launches, so don't plan on it. Any of these spots is a fine place to be. The one bad place is inside a building or in your car.

WHEN TO ARRIVE Hours early. HOURS. For a regular launch on a weekday, I'm on the riverfront three hours ahead. For a weekend launch, four. For a big one (John Glenn, see below) people came the night before and slept in their cars, and the roads into Titusville were parking lots by lunchtime. U.S. 1 and the causeways are the only ways in and they were not built for this. The good news is there's no traffic AT the launch, because everybody is already parked and looking up. The bad news is AFTER the launch, when 50,000 people all decide to leave at the same moment. Don't. Sit back down. Have a sandwich. Wait an hour. Earl and I used to stay and watch the little contrail cloud drift and bend in the wind for a good half hour after. It's prettier than the traffic. The launch window. A launch is scheduled for a certain minute, and there's a "window" of a few minutes to a couple of hours around it. Sometimes they hold the count for a while and go later in the window. So the scheduled time is the EARLIEST it can go, not necessarily when it goes. Which brings me to the radio.

WHAT TO BRING WANDA'S LAUNCH BAG (as of 1999) A portable radio with fresh batteries. THE most important thing. The local stations carry the countdown live, and it's the only way to know if there's a hold, when the clock comes off the hold, and the last ten seconds. With a radio you know it's coming. Without one you're just staring at a speck. Folding chairs. One per person. You will be sitting for hours. Sunscreen and a hat. The riverfront has no shade. I got a sunburn in DECEMBER once. Bug spray. It's Florida. It's a river. Enough said. For night launches this goes to the top of the list. Cooler: water, more water, sandwiches, fruit. There are places to eat in town but you don't want to give up your spot. Binoculars. With a decent pair from Titusville you can see the shuttle standing on the pad, and after it goes you can follow it much longer and see the two solid rocket boosters peel away about two minutes in. Camera and LOTS of film. Set it up ahead. Then, and this is my real advice: take two pictures and put the camera down and WATCH IT. You can buy a postcard. You can't buy the feeling. A blanket or towel for the grass, and a sweater; even in summer it cools off after dark by the water. Patience. Also see "Scrubs" below.

SCRUBS HAPPEN A "scrub" is when they call off the launch for the day. Weather is the usual reason (thunderstorms in the summer, lightning within so many miles, high winds, clouds too low, and it can even be the weather at the emergency landing sites across the ocean), and sometimes it's a piece of equipment that doesn't read right. They will not launch if something's not right, and after 1986 nobody around here would want them to. If you come to Florida just to see a launch, give yourself at least three days, and be ready to come back to the river the next morning. A scrub is a disappointment but it's part of it. The people who leave town mad are the ones who planned one day. My personal record: Columbia, July 1999. First try, July 20, a beautiful night, the count went all the way down and STOPPED AT SEVEN SECONDS. Seven! Something about a hydrogen reading in the engine compartment. (It turned out to be a false alarm, but you don't take chances with hydrogen.) The whole riverfront just let out its breath. Second try, July 22, lightning storms, scrubbed. Third try, July 23, and she went at 12:31 in the morning, and it was the most beautiful night launch I have ever seen. Three nights in a row on the riverfront with my neighbor Doris and about a thousand new best friends. Worth every mosquito.

NIGHT LAUNCHES If you get to pick, pick a night launch. A daytime launch is a white column of smoke and a bright flame and it's wonderful. A night launch turns midnight into noon. The moment the engines light, the whole sky across the river goes ORANGE, you can see the pad and the water and every face along the shore lit up like a sunrise, and then she climbs on a pillar of fire and the light slides across the clouds. You can follow the flame for a long, long time, and when the boosters drop off you can see them tumble away as two little sparks. Then it's just a star moving away, and then it's gone, and everybody is standing there in the dark with their mouths open. The July 1999 launch (above) was one, and the December 1998 launch that took the first American piece of the new space station up was another, at 3:30 in the morning, and there were still hundreds of us on the river. Bring the bug spray and the sweater. And a flashlight for getting back to the car.

THE SOUND First-timers always get fooled by this, so listen: you see it before you hear it. Light gets to you right away; sound takes about five seconds a mile. From Titusville, twelve miles off, the shuttle is already well up in the sky and has been climbing in complete silence for close to a minute before the sound arrives. People start to say "huh, it's quieter than I thought" and THEN it rolls in over the water. It's not a bang. It's a low, rolling, crackling roar, like a huge sheet of canvas tearing very slowly, that comes up through the ground and rattles the car windows behind you and goes on and on while she climbs. On the NASA Causeway, closer in, you feel it in your chest. On the river it's still enough to make babies cry and grown men whoop. It fades as she gets higher and farther out over the ocean, and a couple minutes after that, everything's quiet and the birds start up again like nothing happened.

MY LAUNCH LIST Fifty-eight launches seen, out of the 95 shuttle flights so far. (I missed a bunch in the mid-80s when we were taking care of Earl's mother up north, and a few to weather, work and being sick. Nobody's perfect.) I keep the whole list in a notebook with the date, the time, where I stood and who was with me. Here are the ones I'd put in a scrapbook, by year. I'm only naming the flights I'm sure of; the rest I just count. Year What I saw 1981 Both Columbia flights. April 12: STS-1, the very first one. Two astronauts, John Young and Bob Crippen, on a brand-new kind of spaceship nobody had ever flown. Earl said "well, it works" and that's about all either of us could say. Then November for the second flight. 1982-1985 Nine or ten in these years. Challenger's first flight in the spring of '83, and that June the flight that took Sally Ride up as the first American woman in space; the riverfront was full of little girls. Lots of satellite-delivery flights, which were the routine ones and never felt routine. 1986 January 28. I was on the river. I'm not going to write about it here except to say that everybody in this town remembers where they stood, and that the Space Walk of Fame is a good place to go and be quiet for a minute before a launch. Nobody flew again for almost three years. 1988 September 29: Discovery, the Return to Flight. The riverfront was as full as I'd ever seen it, and as quiet, until she cleared the tower, and then I have never heard a noise like that crowd. People I didn't know hugged me. 1989-1992 A dozen or so. April 24, 1990: Discovery carrying the Hubble Space Telescope. A daytime launch, and I remember thinking it was the most important cargo since the Moon. May 1992, the brand-new Endeavour's first flight, the replacement orbiter. 1993-1997 Fourteen or fifteen. December 2, 1993: Endeavour, the first Hubble repair mission, a night launch before dawn, and they fixed the telescope's eyesight. June 27, 1995: Atlantis on the first flight to dock with the Russian Mir station. Several more Mir flights after that. And in November 1996 Columbia's longest-ever shuttle flight, nearly eighteen days. 1998 October 29: Discovery with John Glenn (see below, it gets its own section). December 4: Endeavour in the middle of the night carrying Unity, the first American piece of the International Space Station. 1999 May 27, Discovery at dawn to the space station. And July 23: Columbia, STS-93, 12:31 a.m., the night launch after two scrubs, with Eileen Collins as the first woman to command a shuttle, carrying the big Chandra X-ray telescope. Fifty-eight and counting.

JOHN GLENN DAY: OCTOBER 29, 1998 I have to tell you about this one because it's the biggest crowd I've ever seen in this town, and I've seen some crowds. John Glenn, who was the first American to orbit the Earth back in 1962, went back up on Discovery at age 77, and the whole country decided to come to Titusville and watch. The President came. The TV people came. RVs were parked along U.S. 1 two days before. My cousin from Ohio (Glenn's home state, she wanted me to be sure and say) drove down and slept on my couch, and we walked to the river at SIX in the morning for a launch that was scheduled for the afternoon, and we still didn't get our usual spot. The papers said a quarter of a million people or more were along the coast. I believe it. Every bit of grass, every bridge, every boat in the river. Flags everywhere. When she went, at about 2:20 in the afternoon, the sound of the crowd came before the sound of the rocket, and it was the closest thing to 1988 I've felt. A lot of folks my age were crying and didn't care who saw. Earl would have loved it. It took us two and a half hours to get the six blocks home, and we didn't mind a bit. Moral for you: if a launch is going to be a Big One, treat it like a hurricane in reverse. Get there the day before, bring everything, and stay put.

MORE SPACE PAGES ON GEOCITIES.US Steve's Model Rocketry Page - Steve is up in Huntsville, Alabama, which is the OTHER rocket town. Skywatch: Satellites You Can See - Priya tells you how to see the space station and Mir go over your own house. My Backyard Observatory - Dr. Petrov built himself a little observatory. Someday! The Paper Airplane Laboratory - a dad and his daughter and a lot of paper. Cute as a button. Skyway Flight Training - if watching isn't enough for you. Back to the Cape Canaveral neighborhood

Under construction: my full launch notebook, typed up, all 58. My grandson says he'll help me over Thanksgiving. You are space fan number to visit since March 1999. Thank you for stopping by! Coming to see a launch? Got a question? Write me: [email protected] (I check my e-mail every evening after the news.) Last updated: September 21, 1999 © 1999 Wanda Gilchrist, Titusville, Florida. This is my own page and my own opinions. I don't work for NASA, I just love them.