Snapshot Paper

McCall 4 across the Complex with everyone around us clapping and cheering. It got my red-blood pumping! My wife was at the end next to the transport waiting for us. I gave her one last kiss and an “I love you,” before crawling in next to my three friends. Leaving her and my kids behind is the hardest part of any flight…

The white short-bus wasn’t too cramped. Only seven students decided to go to the launch, along with two other teachers. It was still twilight-dark, so the ride over to the Kennedy Space Center Visitors’ Complex was spent in a mixture of that half-awake, half-asleep state that most people have in the morning after a long dose of REM sleep. Once we were there, all we could do was wait. The longest wait of my life just made time tease me constantly until that magical moment when the timer on the launch hit T-minus 10 minutes…

I was safely nestled in my seat going over the final flight checks with CAPCOM. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary; it actually seemed calm. The controls in front of me were all lit up, the crew was laying in the chairs that faced towards the sky, and CAPCOM said communications were working perfectly. I checked my harness for the 5th time in 5 minutes. The feeling was not unlike jumping off a cliff: once you take the leap, there’s no turning back. It was both exhilarating and scary. I looked around at the last crew of any American space shuttle, and felt nothing but pride in all three of them…

The large, red-digit clock across the shallow pond hit the 10 minute mark. I bolted as fast as I could with Jon beside me to the edge of the 4-foot tall chain-link fence closest to Launch Complex 39-A. Again time and I played the waiting game, as I struggled to get clear pictures of the white shuttle, white SRBs, and the orange external fuel tank against the contrasting azure sky dotted with clouds in the distance. My hands only worsened the quality from the amount of