I wanna see a rocketship!

No such luck for me. We'll have to see about the Saturday launch. 
 

And here's an FYI to those of us from states without toll roads: when visiting a state WITH tolls, you can buy a $5 Sun Pass automatic toll sensor before going to the car rental place. Otherwise, some rental agencies will charge you $12 PER DAY for the convenience of borrowing theirs -- PLUS your tolls >:(

Now you know. 

We went to the Space View Park in Titusville on Saturday for the launch of a host of Starlink satellites. There were a bunch of people there, a lot of stories to share, and dolphins and manatees showed up, too.

 Apparently due to high winds (for the retrieval of the booster, I'm told) they delayed and delayed it and then pushed it back until Sunday afternoon. We had a very disappointed car full heading back. 
 

On Sunday we were at our resort in Orlando and weren't driving back the 1.5+ hours with kids for another *possible* launch, so we found a wide open parking lot and faced East. As we were heading to our viewing spot we saw a couple standing there staring East. My wife called it-- turns out they were there to see it too. It was fun to have company for the show, the couple there was knowledgeable about how it would go and the guy played the video while I aimed my camera at the sky. About 30 seconds in, my oldest spotted it and we saw it blaze through the sky. SO COOL. That white dash in the upper right is the flame

Funny thing, afterward my kids were just bewildered at all the people going about their day, oblivious to it. Haha, I get it :)

About that flight - due to some performance improvements, it was the heaviest payload launched on a Falcon 9. 17.5 tons, including one more satellite than previous Florida Starlink launches. So that's cool.

 I think it was the 13th flight for that booster.

Looks like I'm heading down again, time to brush off the rocket schedule links!

Very cool. We totally missed the one the other night. Got the ping–one hour until launch–and then got lost watching TV. 

P3PPY said:

Looks like I'm heading down again, time to brush off the rocket schedule links!

There is a app for that now. Spacecoastlaunch. 

David S. Wallens said:

Very cool. We totally missed the one the other night. Got the ping–one hour until launch–and then got lost watching TV. 

You also missed one about 10 minutes ago :)

In reply to Keith Tanner :

It’s like one every few days around here. 

In reply to David S. Wallens :

You're not wrong. But there's a big one coming, maybe this weekend.

Keith Tanner said:

David S. Wallens said:

Very cool. We totally missed the one the other night. Got the ping–one hour until launch–and then got lost watching TV. 

You also missed one about 10 minutes ago :)

HA! We have some friends snow-birding it down there for the month of Jan with their kids. We're all gonna meet up when we get down there so I was texting with them about upcoming launches. Then I saw one for Jan 6 atttt RIGHT THEN -- I phoned them and was like "hey get the kids outside, there's a launch in 50 seconds"

"you said 50 minutes from now?"

"No, SECONDS- as in 35, 34, 33!"

Reminds me of the joke:

Guy goes into the doctor for a random back pain. The doc comes back and says "I've got bad news, it's terminal."

Patient: "Oh no! How long do I have to live, doc??"

Doc: "Five"

Patient: "'Five'?? Five months? Five years??"

Doc: "four, three, two..."

In reply to P3PPY :

When they did the controlled demolition, or whatever they called it, to test crew escape measures a few years back, a friend and I met at Space View Park. 

Healthy crowd but not too bad. IIRC, the launch was pushed back an hour or so but it still lifted off that morning.

The rocket quickly disappeared in the clouds.

“Awwwwww,” from the crowd.

Then, a second later, it emerged.

“Yay!”

Then it exploded!!

It was like watching something from Hollywood. (Yes, somewhere I have photos shot with a big lens.)

It looks like with the launch being from launchpad 40, I can see it just as easily from this causeway and a more direct view over the water, too! 3:20ish today you can find me here at the arrow grinning

Looks like today’s launch is now set for 5:05 p.m. 

I got to see one space launch in my life so far. It was an unmanned ISS resupply mission launched out of Wallops Island--an Antares rocket carrying the Cygnus spacecraft. This was in 2014. I remember the rocket climbing off of the pad, then slowing to stop, and then... going backwards? Probably 20 of us uttered "is it supposed to do that?". We all knew it was, indeed, not supposed to do that. It's just the reaction you have when you watch a space launch in reverse. It was almost like they forgot something and had to go back to get it. Interestingly, the whole thing happened before we even heard the engines start, so we watched it all happen, then we listened to it happen. If you see pictures of the explosion, it looks like it was a nighttime launch, but it was only dusk--the sun was still visible--but because of how bright the explosion was, camera exposures were all on the lower end so you could see the details of the fireball, making the rest of the image look like night.

We didn't go to space that day.

David S. Wallens said:

Looks like today’s launch is now set for 5:05 p.m. 

Here's hoping it's today

In reply to confuZion3 :

That's amazing!

Looks like it’s still scheduled for 5:05 p.m. It’s going to head south, so not the greatest view for us north on the launch. Still, I’ll walk outside and watch. 

P3PPY said:

In reply to confuZion3 :

That's amazing!

Lol It was a little disappointing in the moment. We were standing there, holding all of our Wallops Flight Facility swag, just slack jawed, after having watched the thing go the wrong way. I had spend like 10 minutes before the launch getting amped up and talking to a woman who watched, in-person, all of the Saturn V Apollo launches. We were all so excited. And then it exploded. And then a mushroom cloud of burning Hydrazine started wafting over towards us and we were told to leave. Like... right now.

So, did you see today’s launch? We caught it from out front.

Dog still wonders why we occasionally just stand around looking at the sky for a few. 

David S. Wallens said:

So, did you see today’s launch? We caught it from out front.

Heck yes we did! It was nuts and over SO fast. Just like this super bright flame searing my eyes then it's up up and away!

I couldn't believe how long the sound took to get to us. I haven't measured as the crow flies but it seemed like the better part of a minute. I just assumed it was part of the background noise for a while but then man like a sharp rolling thunder. 
 

That's pretty cool seeing your picture, like "YES! I was there! I saw that particular layer of sky where the contrails formed!!"

It’s cool, isn’t it? Sometimes we hear the roar about five or so minutes later, long after losing sight of the rocket. 

Watching at night was WAY cooler! We had a straight shot of it from our balcony and woke the kids to see it. SO cool. I could imagine you might even see a reentry burn at night, too. 
 

I had been hoping to go down to the beach to watch it but one really cool aspect of watching it near buildings was that the sound vibrations rattled windows, giving it even more of a visceral impact. Not getting to watch it from the beach reminded me yet again of the lyric from Dave Matthew's Band: "if you hold on too tight to what you think is your thing, you may find you're missing all the rest"

Oh yeah, night launch last night. Clear skies for us so we could track it for a long, long time.