Looking to the Sky

Two rocket launches from the front porch.

A reflection this week rather than a trip. Some thoughts from a front porch in Florida, about fifteen minutes from Kennedy Space Center. This one first appeared on my website, Wander The Road. There is a video of both launches at the bottom.

My brother and his family live about fifteen minutes from Kennedy Space Center. Close enough that rockets go up over their house on a regular basis, the way planes pass over a house near an airport. On one visit I got lucky and caught two of them from their front porch, back to back over a few days.

The first was a night launch, a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying a GPS satellite up into the next-generation constellation. We made a real event out of it. Pulled up the pre-show on YouTube, sat around listening to the countdown and the commentary the way you would a ballgame, and then walked out onto the porch together right as it cleared the treeline. The adults stood out there with our heads back and watched the whole thing climb. The kids came out, looked up, decided they had seen it, and went right back to whatever they had been doing inside.

Falcon 9 burns kerosene, and kerosene burns bright and orange and throws off soot, so in the dark it was all flame. A long, steady tail of fire climbing straight up, bright enough that you could follow it well after the sound rolled in.

The second was a sunrise launch a few days later, a Blue Origin New Glenn, a big heavy lift rocket over three hundred feet tall, carrying a commercial communications satellite. This one I had to work for. I set an alarm, got up in the dark before anyone else was stirring, and kept refreshing the launch status site to make sure it was still a go, because a launch is never really a go until it is. My mom came out to watch it with me.

New Glenn burns methane instead of kerosene, and a methane flame is a completely different animal. It is pale and clean and nearly see-through, almost no color to it at all. Against a brightening sunrise sky it washed out to practically nothing, and the rocket climbed on what looked, from the porch, like no flame at all. Just a bright object rising on a shimmer, like heat coming up off a road in summer. After the wall of orange fire from a few nights before, it was a strange thing to watch, quiet and a whole lot less to look at. I found out later the satellite did not even make its intended orbit, though there was no way to know that standing there in the early light. From where I stood it was just a quiet thing going up into a pink sky.

But I would have watched it either way, and that is the whole difference between them and me. For me, both of these were brand new. I had never in my life seen a rocket go up in person, and watching something climb up and out of sight is not a thing you forget. For my brother and his family, these launches are just part of the backdrop. They go up over the house on a schedule, close enough to rattle a window, and after enough of them you stop walking outside every time. That is not them being jaded, and it is not them missing anything. It is just what happens to the extraordinary when it starts showing up on a calendar. It becomes ordinary. It becomes the neighborhood.

A satellite launch, as much as it got me, is a semi driving by for somebody who lives off the freeway. The first one turns your head. After that it is just traffic in the background of your day, and you would not think to point it out to a guest. I have not hit that point yet. To this day I will stop and look at any airplane, any helicopter, any star that catches my eye, no matter how ordinary it is. I still set the alarm. I still walk outside.

The video below covers both launches, the night Falcon 9 and the sunrise New Glenn.

If you want more like this, the trips and the places behind these moments live over at Wander the Road. The library keeps growing, new stories, national parks, state parks, ghost towns, and the odd roadside stop, all of it from the road. Come wander for a while.