Video of The Day: TDRS-L Launch

I still haven’t gotten around to blogging properly about my trip to Florida. I keep meaning to sort out and edit all my photos before writing about it, but we’re now 1.5 months further and I still haven’t done it. Ugh. Bad blogger.

One of the highlights of the trip for me was seeing an actual rocket launch. A. Freaking. Rocket. Launch. Specifically this one:

I followed the advice of our tour guide earlier that day to not attempt to take any photos or videos and just watch the entire thing with your own eyes. I’m glad I did. There’s a ton of footage out there anyway from others and experiencing something like that yourself instead of through the lens of a gadget did make it more special.

We were really lucky though. The rocket (Atlas V) was carrying a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-L (TDRS-L) which only had a 40 minute window to launch in. A few minutes before the launch they discovered problems with the telemetry dropping out and the launch had to be delayed. They finally managed to launch with a few minutes to spare, but we know how lucky we were that it didn’t get postponed to the next day!