A few days before Phoenix launch, as I knew I was going to be away from the internet, I tried to find out the phone n° @ Nasa I used to call to follow launches on the phone. I've got some reactions here about the interest of listening only without actualy watching and I guess this deserves its own topic.
If the moments of lift off up to probe release are exiting, what I realy love myself is "before" and "after". I mean, I don't take pleasure only during 9.8 seconds watching a 100m race. I realy love to know what is gona happen, I listen to the differents coms, go's, status assesments by Official speaker, and so on... In my mind, listening i.e. imagining what is going on give me a stonger feeling than images themselves. I guess that, if I was to watch a launch from the Cape, I'll be very frustated not having real time informations.

Landing is something a bit different since...there's NO images at all. By Apollo's flights my English was not good enough to understand in the text what was going on. By MPF, I had to rely on a dial com which I had to reboot after each information was coming down (very good feeling up to now thou ). By Spirit landing I was in Pasadena with the TPS sharing not only JPL's coms and images but also sharing with 2000 people in the same room. Another
I'm sure each of us here has some feeling and/or souvenirs to share on this topic...

Spirit Landing...I felt physically ill.

I'm with you there. After the loss of Beagle 2, watching the EDL on NASA TV on the Web from Alaska was just agonizing...but what a catharsis when the first pics came in!!! My ex & my stepson thought I was nuts, but oh well...

In the sixties, I watched the countdowns for the Mercury and Gemini flights, enraptured. I also enjoyed the coverage of the flights themselves, but until we got to Apollo, there wasn't all that much to see while the flights were in progress -- just animations and artists' renderings. And even the entry and splashdown phases weren't all that visually interesting at first -- it took until the middle of the Gemini program before there was live TV coverage from the recovery vessels. I can still recall that the very first live, on-the-scene images from a Gemini recovery was for Gemini V, and it wasn't TV coverage. The press had set up a photofax link by which photographs were taken, quickly developed and printed, and then scanned and transmitted back to the shore. The very first close-to-live images of astronauts on the carrier deck were still pictures of bewhiskered Cooper and Conrad.

Of course, Apollo ushered in the era of live television from American spacecraft in flight, and that changed a lot of things. The very first TV shows from Apollo 7 held me in complete thrall, especially when they pointed the camera out the window. Then, of course, came Apollo 8, and the wonder of live (if crude) TV images from the Moon. It excited my sense of wonder like nothing else ever had.

But the countdowns... those were the best. When the flights weren't scrubbed, anyway. I remember a lot of scrubs, in specific the various scrubs of Gemini VI (once after I had enjoyed the Atlas launch of the Agena that never made it into orbit, another after the shutdown on the pad), and the multiple scrubs of Gemini IX and IX-A. I can recall very, very clearly that I spent a hot and muggy June day at an aunt's house because I was visiting with my grandmother, who had no TV set, and I *needed* to see the Gemini IX launch. So I agitated to go to my aunt's house, where there was a TV (but where there was also an aunt I didn't particularly care for) so I could watch the launch. I saw the Atlas launch, but then the Agena failed on its way into orbit and the Gemini launch was scrubbed. I felt so cheated that day... *sigh*...

The perils of Tom Stafford notwithstanding, however (he who ended up involved in more Gemini scrubs and Atlas/Agena failures than any other pilot in the program), Gemini was the best for a countdown lover. I got two countdowns and two launches (first of the Agena, second of the Gemini) when things went right. And they did go right on four of the flights; for Geminis VIII, X, XI and XII I was treated with dual-launch spectaculars, and I truly enjoyed them.

I don't want to get into the Apollo 1 fire in any great detail, except to say that if it had not happened and had Apollo 1 flown as scheduled, the next mission (which might not have flown for more than a year afterwards) would have been another spectacular dual-launch, with LM-3 being launched by one Saturn IB and CSM 101 (the first of the Block II CSMs) being launched by another, roughly 90 minutes apart. With the exception of the dual IB launch, this would have been pretty much the exact mission eventually flown as Apollo 9. And while I enjoyed every single Saturn V launch I ever watched (none in person, drat the luck), I would have enjoyed seeing such a dual-launch spectacular in Apollo.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy unmanned spacecraft launches, too -- I've especially enjoyed the Delta II launches which feature the live camera feed from the nose fairing. But those halcyon Gemini days still bring up fond memories.

-the other Doug

Here's an exemple of what I'd like to know. It's to be found on Emily's blog : http://planetary.org/explore/topics/kaguya/launch_blog.html
and show how Japaneses react to launches as compared to more "latin" people.

The reaction in Japan is just to turn any circular diagrammatic feature into a face It's SOOo cute!

Doug

Great topic

As far as launches are concerned, I love watching all of them, space geek that I am, and I feel very excited and tense during all of them, but if I'm honest I feel more relaxed usually watching unmanned launches because although I know there's a lot at stake science wise, I also know that no-one will die if the rocket fails. But sitting here squinting at the Real Player window on my pc I still feel like my heart is beating in my mouth whenever I watch NASA TV showing a shuttle prepare for launch and then finally fly. ( I wonder if anyone else out there leans in towards the screen and actually says something like "Go on... go on...!" as the shutle launches? No? Oh, ok, just me then... )

As for landings, shuttle landings usually happen when I'm at work, so... confession time... I get my mum to text me when the shuttle is down safely. Go ahead, laugh, but I can't settle until I know. And I'm with Doug on having felt physically sick when Spirit landed. Didn't help that I was sleep-deprived, not having bothered to go to bed after being a live studio guest on a midnight radio show on Radio 5 (along with writer Ian Ridpath, I recall) discussing the landing - well, it was supposed to be discussing the landing, but the stupid presenter (no names....Richard Bacon, oops, slipped out, sorry...) turned it into a cliched "is space exploration worth the money?" debate with lots of "Angry From Surrey" types calling in to rant about it... anyway, it was torture watching the landing, but when that first pic came in I actually jumped out of my chair with joy and relief.

I just wish I could have had the same experience with Beagle. Not fair. Not fair at all.

Yeah...it is, actually!

Really liked JAXA's coverage of the Kaguya launch; though; that H-2A did not mess around! I'd've been whooping & screaming the whole time, and so would have all the nisei I know here in LA ...guess it just illustrates how much culture influences us all.

Yep! But it took a while to launch it

You know what ? I can't stand an Ariane launch countdown in French...it give me NO emotion at all. I've got to turn to the English version...
I guess they'll have to try subtittles for me to see if it makes the trick.

I also remember fly bys, like Voyager II live in Pasadena or Giotto live on French television : they were both less emotional than a landing, may be because we knew risks were less likely or at least differents. Nevertheless, I experienced a kind of looong countdown, thinking "were's Voyager II now", getting closer and closer to the Satelittes, then the planet . Then images get to us bringing another flow of emotion that were exacerbated because I was right where the action was : Pasadena.

On another hand, launches from the Moon provided a different kind of emotions to me : they were unreal. On top of this, I could not imagine Nasa could fail in flight... and, when you're on the surface of the Moon you're kinda "in flight".

More thoughts to come ...

Actually, for every one of the twelve humans who landed on the Moon, there was absolutely no sensation of being "in flight" when they were on the surface. As strange as the place was, as cramped as the cabin was, as odd as the low gravity was -- the overriding sensation was of being on the ground. Immobile.

I guess it's the same as any of us. We're "in flight" -- we circle the Sun, we spin along on the surface of a sphere that's rotating at a pretty fair clip, we're dragged along as the Sun flies through space in its galactic orbit, and the whole galaxy is speeding along within the rest of the Cosmos...

And yet, because I'm at the bottom of a gravity well, and because if I set something down in front of me it stays there, and because I can get out of my vehicle and walk across the plains in front of me to see what's over the horizon... for all of these reasons, I'm on the ground.

The same was overwhelmingly true, for all of the men who landed on the Moon, once they had landed. As Pete Conrad once said, he was in no-sweat mode the entire time he was on the surface -- because he wasn't flying.

As for me, though, while I found the lunar liftoffs exciting and a little scary, they never were as big a deal for me as the launches and landings. For one thing, we never got to see the first three real-time, and so there was nothing to see at all (except for some fairly crude animations the networks had put together). And while I was pretty nervous about the first one (since no one had ever even done a fire-in-the-hole separation of the LM's ascent and descent stages before, not even in ground tests), that was the only one I ever really sweated out. (Of course, the LM's descent engine had also never been fired in flight for anything like the 12 minutes of a PDI burn before Apollo 11, either, and for some reason that fact, which I knew at the time, didn't make me at all nervous. Go fig.)

But even with the J missions, when we actually got to see the LMs lift off, it just wasn't the highlight of the surface operations for me. Yeah, it was cool... and somewhat spectacular. But I had great faith in the ascent engines by then, I figured there were so many ways to fire that engine, there just wasn't all that much to worry about.

Maybe one of the things that kept the lunar lift-offs from being all that impressive to me is that, for the ones we could see, they never got the audio synced up with the TV. Because of the converters they had to use to merge the 3-filter color wheel TV system into an NTSC electronic color image, they either had to delay the audio by exactly as much time as the converters delayed the picture (something like 8 seconds) or they had to run out of sync. The NASA feed ran them out of sync for every liftoff, and that somehow always ruined it for me.

-the other Doug

How I feel at launches depends what I have riding on it. Literally, in some cases. I work now on short term contracts as a spacecraft engineer in Europe; if what I'm working on happens to blow up at launch, then my job is over. If you have a family, this makes the launches a bit, shall we say, stressful.

When I worked at an American aerospace company in the 90's, we had so much work that we immediately went from one spacecraft to another, on an assembly line. And my job continued, no matter what happened. So if one blew up, it was a relief because we could skip the Launch and Early Operations Phase (LEOP) work and then we had more time for the next one. I hear things are a lot, lot less busy now, so I imagine it hits a lot harder.

And for me it depends what the payload is. If the world loses a communications satellite, everyone will continue to get their soap operas and use their ATM machines. If we lose something like Rosetta or a the Webb telescope, it is a much greater loss to us all.

O Doug,

I think, it's exactely what is important to share! My feeling was that Apollo's astronauts were in flight when been walking on the Moon and here you show that it was not Pete's feeling. But, when I'm away from home for a short period of time, my experience show that I feel "in flight", I mean more concentrated on small details than when I'm home.

I also get what you mean regarding been on Earth and not feeling the speed.
On another hand, when you're on the Moon, you can't see "external" movements as fast as on Earth like shooting stars, sunrise & sunset. On the Moon, the only changing celestrial body would be the Earth rotation because our planet looks some 4 times bigger than the Moon appears from here. The Sun movment should not be noticible for a short period of time.

Let me also tell you that one can "feel" external movment from Earth. Two weeks ago, I slept on a peak and as it was waaaay to be very confortable I woke up may be 50 times during the night. I sew Jupiter as the "first start", then the sky start showing more and more stars; then the Milky way went stronger & stronger. Later, I sew our Galaxy trench in a different place, Jupiter disapeared, the Moon rose. Later the Moon was to the West. Later again, Orion, Sirius, and finaly Venus set before the Sun itself. I can tell you, that, once you know it, you can "see" Earth rotation even if you can't feel it (not talking about feeling the Sun's course around the Galaxy).

I can't imagine it being any other way. In fact, I experience repeated cognitive dissonance every time I look at a "Flight Director Report" or update on the Mars rovers -- I want to say "It's not a flight, fellas, you're driving on the ground!"

I know some launch directors that are paid big money for working 8 minutes 3-4 times a year ! Just joking !
You're right David, but I guess that us, UMSF'ers we're 24/7/365 in flight

Well, I remember being excited watching the 19 January 2006 pre-launch countdown of the Atlas V on NASA online TV.
Another launch I'll never forget is the very first (test) flight of an Ariane V in 1996, it failed because of a software problem and I'll never forget the images of the debris going down little twinkling fireworks into the jungle. Moreover, it carried a scientific payload; ESA's 4 cluster spacecraft...

There are 2 moments which I have which were somewhat unique than most people in this sense. The first one happened March, 2006, during the MOI of MRO. One week before, I had been interviewed, and accepted, a post as a student programmer with the HiRISE camera, pending the successful MOI of the MRO. I was about to have what until then had only been a dream, to be able to work with a real space mission, pending the successful MOI. I was quite nervous. Of course, I have little doubt that those who had worked on the project for years were even more nervous, but they got to hide it by being in the front two rows (I stood in at row 3.) I attended the MOI party they held at the University of Arizona, it was quite amazing.

The second happened 4 months later, and involves considerably more of my life. Three and a half years prior, I had started working on 4 cubesats with the University of Arizona. Of the four, one was never really fit to fly, one was a fully-functional ground test cubesat, which was loaned to us from Rincon Research, who funded 3 of the cubesats. The other two were on a Russian DNEPR, set to launch that afternoon. I was the last student to join the SSP at the UA, the others had been working there for some time previous, but it had always been my dream to work with space technology, and I sought out the program, despite being hampered by a lack of information. After all of that time, there was only 3 students still left at the UA, myself included, one who was in grad school and still involved from across the country, Chuck Green, who has helped to build most of the recent AMSAT missions, and Uwe Fink, our not-quite-willing adviser who just couldn't say no. In the room were about 40 people, most of them from various local news agencies. I was the tech point of contact, setting up the live video display to the general public, and keeping tabs on the chat room where I could hear from the other people who were involved in the project. I also was involved in setting up the telecon which was being broadcast to us from CalPoly, our point of contact for the launch. Finally the time of the launch was upon us. The video feed we had from the launch wasn't synced up with the audio, sounds much like the Apollo launches someone here mentioned previously. The count down went to 0, and nothing happened for a few seconds, then the rocket lit up the screen, we were all excited. We were awaiting the news to here if the launch was successful, in the room with so many press. After 2 minutes, the updates stopped coming in, we just keep hearing, the simulation says we should be this high. Chuck Green, who had the most experiences with launches, first noticed that this was a sign of problems. About 10 minutes after launch, I noticed that they said something along the lines of "Launch Failure". Quickly I grabbed the microphone from Uwe Fink, and announced the dreaded news, in the mean time trying to find out what I could about it from the chat room. Soon the press flooded us with questions, most of which we didn't have any answers to. The telecon made it sound like there was a chance that they had still orbited, but just not in the planned orbit, which would have been fine for us. But they couldn't tell us exactly what happened for about 3 hours after, at which time the press release came. It was definitely an interesting experience. In the end, it helped open the doors that I wanted, and I did get my hands on something that reached 30 miles high (Although I think I've now officially made it to the space limit, at least in software, but that's another story).

But I still find it quite fun to see launches happening, it really is a neat experience. Just that I have those two that really stick out in my mind.