"4.5 Million Pounds of Hardware & Humans"

The mission patch for STS-129.The Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Cape Canaveral, FL today on a mission to resupply the International Space Station and deliver spare parts in preparation for the retirement of the Shuttle.  For the first time in recent memory, the Shuttle was able to launch in her first window, without any scrubs for weather or technical issues.  Atlantis is now approximately 136 miles above the Indian Ocean on a rendezvous orbit with the ISS.  It carries 3 Astronauts on their first spaceflights, a Butterfly science experiment full of caterpillars, and one of Amelia Earhart's scarfs.

   I have been alive for 121 Shuttle missions, and have quite literally grown up with NASA's shuttle program.  I was alive for the Challenger disaster and felt my heart sink into the abyss as I stood in a rest stop on I-95 and watched Columbia scatter into the blue.  There are only five planned shuttle missions left, and I will watch each and every one of them with growing sadness because after the final launch of Discovery (the shuttle with the most missions) in September of nest year, it may be quite some time before we see manned space exploration in the United States.  

    The Constellation program, the program designed to return the US to space after the mothballing of the Shuttles, and then return us to the Moon and go beyond to Mars, is unlikely to survive in it's originally envisioned state, if at all.  The exploded national debt and the need to address expensive problems here on Earth will likely curtail if not kill off our national effort to return to the Moon and go beyond it.  This is depressing not only because there is a great deal of science and technology to be learned and discovered along the course of any endeavor, but because we are trapped on this planet.  We live in a sealed glass box, and in the entire course of human history we have only just begun to escape it.  To live your entire life inside a cage--a magnificent cage, but still a cage--and then give up on your escape just when you learn to reach a hand out beyond and grasp the latch, is tragic.  The fate of the Constellation program and manned space flight is grim but still uncertain so while we await it's fate, what better than to enjoy the final episodes of our current space programming?

Below you will find the HD video of this afternoon's launch, probably the best daytime launch I've ever seen.  Give it a spin.  If you'd like to follow Atlantis and her crew of six for the next 11 days (she's scheduled to land the morning after Thanksgiving, and will have seven aboard) you can go to SpaceVidCast.com/live and watch virtually every second of the mission including the three 6-hour spacewalks.  This also features a chat room full of space geeks happy to answer questions.  If you're on the go and have an iPhone, you can watch anywhere you go, just browse to iphone.akamai.com and select the NASA feed.  This mission is on a timetable that is relatively similar to US sleep schedules, so much of the mission will be viewable in real time.  While the astronauts and space station crew sleep, the highlights of the day will be shown on these feeds.