Second star to the left and straight on till morning

I had a bunch of stuff to do this morning, so I decided to record our return to space this morning with the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery.

I just sat down to have a sandwich and watch the recording. I was blown away by the beauty of the launch and got a little chocked up because of it. Why? I have no idea, I don’t think that I had watched a launch since I was a little kid. But with the technology of the onboard cameras and the zooms on ground cameras, it surely was a thing of beauty.

I especially liked that you could clearly see the separation of the booster rockets and the non-event of the tank separation.

I hope this revitalizes our efforts to explore space, and spurs innovation on better ways of extending our reach. I think it is awesome that people like Burt Rutan and the people at Scaled Composites were able to keep our interest up while NASA made improvements to its culture. Now we need them all to come together and “out innovate” each other to make some leaps and bounds.