Mission to Cape Canaveral
Day 3: STS-86 Launch

Thursday, September 25, 1997

(The day's narrative has yet to be written.)

Pictures

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[photo] Entrance to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
[photo] Picture from the tour bus of KSC's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), from about two miles away. This building is about 50 stories tall, where the Space Shuttle is attached to the external tank and solid rockets inside the building. The building is about twice as tall as needed for Space Shuttle assembly because it was originally built for assembly of the Saturn V rockets for the Apollo missions to the moon, all of which were assembled there too.
[photo] Getting closer to the VAB. Notice the clouds are getting darker too. The flag on the building is about 3 acres in size. The tour bus drivers liked to point out that the flag is big enough that, if it were placed on the ground, the bus could easily drive down one of the stripes.
[photo] This is nearly the closest point of the expressway to the VAB. The clouds are still getting darker...

The next several pictures are indoors at the Saturn V Museum, the next stop of the tour bus northward from the VAB. A thunderstorm was in progress outside that had several people doubting the launch would take place that evening with its 10-minute launch window.
[photo] Saturn V Museum: This is the original equipment from the Apollo launch control room. The picture was taken just before a show began (where they asked people not to use flash photography) which recreated the Apollo 8 launch including recordings, lights on the panels operating as they did that day, chairs being illuminated when the person from that position was speaking on the recording, and video of what it looked out the window that day at that time. Very well done.
[photo] After the show, exiting to the right leads to this enormous room with a real Saturn V rocket, one of the ones which had not yet been launched when the program was cancelled.

Saturn V's like this took 6 manned missions to the Moon, each with crews of 3 astronauts, and launched America's Skylab Space Station in 1973.
[photo] Another view of the Saturn V, with some people in the foreground to provide some scale. The rocket is absolutely huge! The signs hanging from the ceiling are the "mission patches" for each of the Moon and Skylab missions lifted to orbit by Saturn V rockets.

We couldn't see the whole Saturn V Museum because we started running out of time to be on our way to the launch viewing site by the time the gates would open at 6:30PM, 4 hours before launch. There are no further pictures from the bus tour because it was raining so hard that there was no point in taking them. The next stop for the tour bus was the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF), an extra-wide runway made for the Space Shuttle.
[photo] This picture shows the Space Station Processing Facility, KSC's newest building. On the NASA Causeway enroute to the launch viewing site, this picture was taken out the window. KSC's Space Station Processing Facility is where the American portions of the International Space Station are being readied for launch.
[photo] The view from the NASA Causeway launch-viewing site before dark. The buildings in the picture are only two miles away, part of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The orange spot seen next to one of the buildings is the external tank of the space shuttle, about 6 miles away. Atlantis is the white blur just below it and the launch Pad 39A is the tall structure just to its left.. All the way to the left in the picture is Launch Pad 39B, about 8-9 miles away, which did not have a shuttle at the time.

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[photo] 10:34PM - Liftoff!

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[photo] Atlantis continues to climb.

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[photo] Atlantis continues to climb.

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[photo] Atlantis continues to climb. A thin layer of cirrus clouds begins to get illumated, which in turn illuminates the smoke trail behind Atlantis.

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[photo] Atlantis continues to climb. The shuttle goes through the cirrus clouds.

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Back up to "Mission to Cape Canaveral"
by Ian Kluft <ikluft@thunder.sbay.org>