March 11, 2008—There were two distinct constituencies for Endeavour’s rare night time launch. The first clue was the two signs pointing the way to the press site. One was in English and the other in Japanese.
Docking is late Wednesday, the spacewalk to deliver the KIBO lab starts late Thursday. Separate subject—if you’re in the Boston area the evening of April 12th, I’ll be giving a talk at Harvard about my book "Final Countdown". It’s a fundraiser for the Mount Washington Observatory. Click here for details… http://www.mountwashington.org/events/boston/ I'll be jetting out of Orlando right after the WMFE "Open House" that day. More to come… |
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Heroes depend on which neighborhood you live in. As we American reporter types sat bleary eyed this morning getting spots together for the morning "drive time" news, audiences in Japan were sitting down to dinner. It’s twelve hours later in the "Land of the Rising Sun". A brigade of Japanese reporters was at Kennedy Space Center to write stories on the Kibo science lab inside Endeavour’s cargo bay. Japanese Astronaut Koichi Wakata was the center of attention. He was there to provide soundbites to the admiring press. His treatment as a hero was a far cry from his first Shuttle mission back in the year 2000. I called a NASA public affairs person to ask how to pronounce Wakata’s name. "It’s like the song from the ‘Lion King’," my contact responded. He then sang the man’s name to the tune of "Hakuna Matata". 
The spectacular nature of Endeavour ‘s agonizingly early liftoff reminded how rare night-time launches have been since the Columbia disaster in 2003. NASA banned blasting off in the dark after the accident. The reason was better lighting for photography of the liftoff. To take a twist on "Red Riding Hood", it’s "all the better to see the Shuttle parts coming off, my dear". Mission managers relaxed the ban in time for Discovery’s launch back in December of 2006. But that flight and Endeavour’s today have been the only ones to light up the Florida sky like daytime since Columbia. People standing next me were mysteriously shrouded in darkness during the final moments of the countdown. But seconds into the liftoff, it was so bright, it was like we were all just standing in line at Starbucks. Then, the shuttle vanished into a low hanging cloud deck, and the show was over.