A little that, a little of this:
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Anybody else recognize Leslie Nielsen (the Capitan) and Earl Holliman(the cook)?
That movie scared me good at something like 5. 
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Ever notice the bad guys all seemed to resemble Nazis?
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Reminder for those who might otherwise have missed it… 15:22 EDT / 19:22 UTC
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That was just outstanding. I admit I was really nervous, but it was really exciting to watch. Back when they launched the space shuttle, I was really too young to understand how many things had to go just right for it to work. Now I see how my parents must have felt back in the Apollo days.
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That was really cool, we watched it as a family
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So did we. I didn’t think it would be that big a deal, but I got chills watching it. It was exciting.
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I honestly don’t know why, but those kinds of events really hit me emotionally.
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Me too! Several firsts there, the biggest I think is that the orbital realm has always been the frontier of governments, not private companies.
This guy has taught us how to halve the cost of putting a pound into LEO. No longer the $40,000,000 per seat on a Soyuz. The Russians laughed at this guy who wanted to get into the rocket business when he came to buy two rocket engines and he offered half the asking price of $20,000.000. They’re not laughing anymore. He designed and produced his own engines. Less cost and more efficient. The Raptor.
The Soyuz was designed in the '60s and has been a reliable workhorse since. One of Elon’s strengths has been to identify technologies that are ripe for disruption and innovation.
“It may be the innovator’s greatest contribution is to realize the full value of the known”.
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I was surprised to find I held my breath for most of the launch and then almost wept in relief. We weren’t planning to watch, just happened to catch it. The last time I watched a launch like that was the Challenger disaster while sitting in my elementary school classroom. My teacher had been among some level of finalists for the Teacher In Space program and the school had set up a big party for her to help take some of the sting out of not being the one on the shuttle that day. It ended up being a really somber day as one might guess, extra counselors were brought in for weeks.
Hadn’t thought about that day in decades, remarkable how it all came flooding back the moment today’s launch began.
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I think it’s that way for any of us who were watching Challenger. The folks who never knew anything but the Space Shuttle as a routine delivery “truck” don’t know all the things that can go wrong and end horribly. NASA was making it look so easy and so routine when it really wasn’t that it shocked everyone. Not that we should have been shocked - think of the thousands of ships that headed toward the edge of the world in the 14/1500s and never came back. Or the wagons heading west in the 1800s. Exploration always has casualties but after Gemini we made it look routine. As a society we weren’t prepared for the loss - especially on national television with a citizen along for the ride.
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I actually got tied up and missed watching today, but I was a little too scared to watch anyway, especially after the explosion yesterday in their other (SN) rocket in Texas. (I remember the Challenger.)
Thrilled that they got it up okay! 
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