36 years ago this morning

So is NASA in Houston.

 

I was also a high school senior in NY. I didn’t remember that it was Regents week, but we had a snow day in our district. I was excited because I usually taped “All My Children” at 1 PM and since I was home, I would be able to watch it in real time. I didn’t watch the launch because we didn’t have CNN since we couldn’t get cable at our house. Of course AMC was pre-empted by the news coverage, which is how I found out. My mom was an elementary school teacher, also out for the snow day. When she went back to work the next day, the teachers had a meeting to discuss how to talk to the kids about it, but only if they asked, and she said in her class (can’t remember what grade she was teaching that year) no one did, so it wasn’t discussed.

 

Atlantis. And NASA does a spectacular job of presenting it. You watch this excellent video, they roll open the doors and there it is, right in front of you, still roughed up from entering the atmosphere during its last mission. I was very glad my parents were with us to see it.

It's really not much bigger than a Class A motorhome with wings.

If you've never visited KSC, it's worth it. The VAB. The Saturn V rocket on its side. The bus tour out to the launch sites. And the Visitor Center is jam-packed with great stuff.

My personal favorite -- which they may not do any longer -- was the excursion to the original Mercury pad and launch control. There were walls of badge and pins from every manned and unmanned support crew dating back to the early '50s. Dad has his RCA badges somewhere.

Having a KSC credential (and the ability to get one from the Air Force for Cape Canaveral) gave me a lot of opportunity to explore places not on the beaten path. There are still WWII hangars from before NACA in some places.

But the time KSC PA took a group of us out to Pad 34, where everything but the gantry tower has been designated to "abandon in place." Looking up through that huge circle in a square slab of concrete and seeing the moon was eerie as hell.

It feels very much like a graveyard.

 

That's so cool about your connection to the Cape.

Yeah that video at start was a bit ho-hum, I was even questioning about whether to continue then they open the curtains and WHAM there's the Atlantis in full, mind-blowing.

We did everything but the bus ride to the abandoned launch pads, might be because of COVID not sure.

KSC was maybe even better than the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum (which I love.)

 

If you can tear the family away from Orlandoland for one day, the Kennedy Space Center is damn interesting, especially if you're at all interested in history and the future of space travel.

I'm not technically a "Canaveral kid" because I only went to kindergarten in Brevard before Dad got the job in Houston, but Mom and I watched all six Mercury missions from the front yard of the house in Indian Harbour Beach. And my parents moved back to the Space Coast the year after Gwen and I got married, and now live less than a half-mile from the original house, although we're trying to get 87 and 86 year old people to think about independent living. So my connection to that piece of land between the Banana River and the ocean (what we would call Beachside) is strong.

I basically landed the job at WMEL because I already had extensive knowledge of the space program. Too bad it didn't really come in handy after Jan. 28, 1986. Plus, the lure of covering sports was still a siren call.

Mom loves to mention she stood behind John Glenn and his wife in line at the Sears store in Cocoa a few months before he became world famous. They were buying a mop. The astronauts were poor military guys before they were "spam in a can." They'd each get a parade in downtown Cocoa Beach after their launches, with perhaps a couple thousand people in attendance!

 

When told the news (in my elementary school stairwell) my nine-year-old self thought the shuttle exploded without anyone on board.

KSC is amazing. Went last summer for the first time. The Challenger memorial is great.

BTW, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died on Jan. 27. RIP to all.

 

At my first job out of law school, I worked for a firm in Miami which represented Lockheed. Much of our work involved discrimination matters brought by people who worked on the shuttle program. We had to get security clearance to be in some of the areas and in preparation for a trial, we were taking pictures of where people worked so we went in during the third shift, where it was basically empty. The powers that be actually let me sit in one of the shuttles, which is probably the coolest thing I have ever done.

 

We lived in Tampa when I was a kid. Once in a while if conditions were right we'd be able to see the contrail when a rocket went up.

My only connection to the space program (other than being a space and SF crazy kid) was my godfather. He was a fighter pilot stationed at MacDill AFB in Tampa. Early on in the space program, cameras recording the launches were not very good - the image would wobble, focus would be poor, and almost all detail would be lost in maybe 20 seconds. He was one of two guys assigned to fly chase planes and record the launches in F-105's equipped with recon cameras. They would stage orbiting near the Cape, and immediately after the launch they'd swoop in, stand their plane on its tail and hit the afterburner. They'd follow it up as far as they could, keeping it on camera as best they could. I thought that was one helluva neat job.

He was killed flying Wild Weasel missions in Viet Nam, playing tag with VC anti-aircraft missile emplacements and blowing them up, until one of them caught him. RIP Major John Musgrove, USAF.

 

Exactly. We had three-day passes for Universal and one-week passes for Disney, with a day in between. I told the wife and kid, "It's Culture Day. We are going to the Kennedy Space Center." I also found a baseball game relatively nearby in Daytona Beach. It was a totally fun day, up early to get the KSC, took the full tour, including the launch sites. Drove up to Daytona in the rain and sat in the car through a downpour, but all the stadium workers kept showing up. Figured they were used to rain. It stopped around 5:30, first pitch at 6:15.

 

Man Cocoa Beach is gorgeous; what’s funny is Space Coast is much smaller than I thought, population wise.

 

I was 25 and completing my first month as a sport reporter at my first daily. We were a p.m. with a 1 p.m. West Coast deadline. The editor was planning to put the shuttle explosion on page 2 until the publisher got back from his service club lunch meeting and said everyone was talking about it and we should put it on A-1.

I was too new to question why it wasn't on the cover in the first place. It was a huge story that actually happened on our cycle.

 

I was a junior or senior in high school when it happened, and those of us in study hall gathered around the TV to see the aftermath. A picture of the explosion became the cover of our school yearbook.