No-Hitch Launch Sends Shuttle Buffs Into Orbit

Minutes before launch, Ken Webb assembled a few strangers in a circle of prayer.

“Lord, please be with our flight crew as they prepare to go into orbit,” said the 32-year-old space buff who had joined the crowds gathered along the coast to watch Discovery take off.

This was the Lakeland, Fla., man’s 20th space shuttle launch, not counting those he had watched on television. Sometimes, he said, he couldn’t find people to pray with him.

This time faith was in abundance.

As the 10:39 a.m. EDT launch neared, a sense of fear lurked beneath the excitement among the hundreds of spectators in Space View Park in downtown Titusville, across the Indian River and several miles from launch pad 39-B at Kennedy Space Center.

After the prayer, Webb pumped his fist in the air and said, “Let’s roll.”

As a huge cloud of smoke erupted in the distance and a neon-orange flame rose in the sky, illuminating the shuttle from below, the crowd broke into applause.

When the shuttle slipped behind clouds, silence swept over the crowd until Discovery reappeared higher in the sky. The applause resumed as a deep bass rumbled across the water.

“It’s like watching Columbus leave from Spain to go to the New World,” Webb said.

Some observers were die-hards like Webb, who described the sound of a shuttle lifting off as “the most beautiful thing in the world.”

Many more were first-timers who left their homes before dawn to claim open spaces by the highways and bought “Return to Flight” T-shirts, paperweights and other memorabilia. By the afternoon, traffic was jammed for miles.

The newcomers missed the first 113 space shuttle launches, but after the Columbia disaster two years ago, they decided to see a blastoff before it was too late.

“I always took the launches for granted,” said David Allen, 39, who as a boy in the late 1960s watched rocket launches with his father on television.

Allen left his home in Miami Beach at 3:30 a.m., driving north with a friend visiting from Padua, Italy.

The friend, Andrea Roncato, said the launch seemed symbolic of the United States’ sense of possibility.

Many spectators said a successful launch could help preserve the U.S.’ standing in the world. They worried that China was gaining in space exploration, and they spoke of the launch as an event that could unite Americans despite political divisions.

“People see this now the way they saw [the space missions] of the 1960s,” said Brian Bishop, 35, a Navy pilot stationed in Jacksonville who had arrived with his girlfriend. “It’s not just space. It’s our country.

“We’re explorers by nature, and we don’t need to stop now,” he said.

Glenn Otto, 60, a former NASA safety manager, wondered if some of the crowd were drawn by morbid curiosity. “A lot of people go to NASCAR races hoping to see an accident,” he said.

Otto was retired by the time of the February 2003 Columbia disaster, but he said it still haunted him. He had planned to follow the shuttle’s reentry into the atmosphere on television and then step outside to see it streak across the sky. He never left the house that day.

The liftoff Tuesday did not entirely restore his faith.

“If we can just get it back safely, then we’ve succeeded,” Otto said after the shuttle faded from view.

Some spectators said they would gladly volunteer for space travel, whatever the dangers. Others were happy to live vicariously.

“I’m too old to be in the space program,” said 55-year-old Robert Osband, who supports a space habit by working at a call center selling hand-held computers. “I should have gone to college and studied more.”

He runs a website for shuttle and rocket followers, space.launch.info. “All looks good,” he wrote in a text message to 80 fellow space junkies as the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters broke away.

In the late 1990s, Osband lobbied to bring the area code 321 to what has become known as Florida’s Space Coast. He reserved one number for himself: (321) LIFTOFF.

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Mission highlights

Thursday: Docking with the space station and unloading of cargo.

Friday: Installation of the Italian-built Raffaello storage module to the space station and examination of Discovery’s heat protection tiles for damage.

Saturday: First space walk. Testing of tile repair techniques in Discovery’s payload bay.

Monday: Second space walk. Installation of a new gyroscope on the space station.

Aug. 3: Third spacewalk. Installation of a work platform on the space station for future activities.

Aug. 5: Undocking from the space station.

Aug. 7: Landing at Kennedy Space Center.