Early Release Day Launch

Early release days always seem to have a bit of adventure interwoven throughout the time that we are together. It may have been the crazy afternoon schedule that we had to go through or, perhaps, twin/triplet/multiple day was the culprit. Most likely, it was a combination of both of those events and several others.

Part of our day was an informal, unplanned discussion about NASA. We talked about the difference between the Apollo missions and spacecraft compared to the Space Shuttle missions and spacecraft. To compliment our discussion nicely, the delayed launch of the next generation Ares Rocket was sitting on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, so we had a live television picture being streamed in from CNN to take a look at that rocket.

After watching a video of Apollo 8 liftoff, followed by a space shuttle launch and landing, we heard in the background of our conversation something along the lines of "Sound suppression water system is activated, T minus 10, 9, 8 ..."

Quickly racing back to the computer, we enlarged the stream from CNN and watched live as the Ares Rocket took off. It was really neat to watch the kids fascination as they witnessed a next generation rocket take off. It led us into a nice discussion about what NASA is planning to do in the future, and even what Mach 1, 2, 3, and 4 means speed wise. For more information on the Ares Rocket, please visit here.

This is what we saw live....