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Comment by hghid | Hacker News Reader

Even though you could question the whole Artemis concept, it's still extremely exciting watching the countdown with my son. I just missed the original Apollo flights and had assumed I would never see a moon landing in my lifetime. We may well not have a landing for quite some time yet, but it's still cool to see a Moon bound rocket standing on the launchpad...

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I don't know if it's feasible for you, but if you can, try to take your kid to see a live rocket launch. The TV is grossly unable to display how awesome these things are in person.

It is one of the things I regret not ever getting to see a shuttle launch. The closest I ever got was when I flew over Florida while a shuttle was on the pad.

I got super, super lucky and managed to get VIP tix for the last one. IIRC I took these pics on my iPhone 5

https://imgur.com/a/Mlyxk9u

wow, that shot of it sitting on the pad is much cleaner than I'd have expected from that phone. i'm envious

I cheated somewhat. I had some good binoculars with me that day and I was juggling those in one hand while holding the iPhone to the eyepiece :)

(and I checked, it was iPhone 4 not 5)

I was wondering how the zoom was so clear. However, I'm familiar with the struggle of shooting that way. I don't have a phone mount for my telescope, but with enough struggle, I can get a decent pic from the viewfinder on my phone. So don't play it off as cheating. It was a bit of skill to get both the binocs and the phone steady and aligned enough to get it.

Either way, it's a shot not everyone is going to have posted to their socials.

And a landing! S Padre is great for kids and rockets.

For the more adventurous and/or bilingual the beaches on the Mexican side seem to have awesome views too.

The scale really is unfathomable for the human brain.

That's what I thought standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. Pictures just do not do it justice. Same thing with Starship. My brain knows it's massive, yet feels underwhelmed looking at it on video. Musk should let his ego build replica Saturn V and a Shuttle next the Starship launch pad so there will be proper perspective available

Have you been to the rocket garden at KSC? The Saturn V isn't vertical, but they've got almost everything from the Redstone and later vertical. I was in Florida in 2018 and I think they were getting ready to display a pair of SRBs. They did have Atlantis inside, too. And of course a horizontal Saturn V.

I saw that Saturn V as a child once, too. I think that the Saturn V really made me the person that I am today. Seeing something so huge, that is literally engineered down to every last tenth of a millimeter - that was profound for a young child. I could not believe how detailed that rocket was, yet so huge. There should be an engineering term for the size of a machine divided by the smallest critical engineered component of the machine. I don't think any machine would have beat that in the Saturn V's day - maybe some ocean liners?

I've never been to KSC. I've been to Houston a few times. I couldn't imagine trying to have a Saturn V permanently standing would be an easy feat with both locations susceptible to hurricanes and tornadoes. Walking the length of it is still pretty impressive.

I come from a construction family, so I'd put some of the famous sky scrapers in that category too. Especially thinking about the crazy beam walkers like that famous photo of the guys riding the I-beam up eating their lunch on the way up.

A few years ago Spacex did a homage to that photo, with the crew working on the Starship. One of those amazing Human For Scale photos that emphasize just how huge that rocket is.

I saw the one in Houston for the first time last week. It was so cool. My favorite spacecraft as a kid, but in real life it was about 4x as big as I expected.

"size of a machine divided by the smallest critical engineered component of the machine"

Computer processors probably take that cake.

That's a great point. And it raises the question if we consider the nanometer scale features of the processor against the size of the rocket as a whole.

Concur. My kids and watched a “small” Falcon 9 launch from the mainland park nearest the pad at Cape Canaveral. The noise alone was astonishing; bring binoculars to see detail.

We lived ~60 miles North of the Cape when I was a young boy, and watching the Saturn V's go on the way to the moon was a forming experience.

I lived in Port Orange FL until i was 12, during night launches my dad would take the family to New Smyrna Beach or some where a short drive South where we watched the shuttles come up over the water somehow. I can't remember the details it was a lonnnng time ago haha. I do remember the launches sounding like popcorn popping.

I live in Dallas now and will be turning 50 soon, i want to catch the next Starship launch live but would have to time it perfectly to get time off of work ahead of time.

You probably watched from the Florida side of the intercoastal waterway between the main part of Florida and Cape Canaveral. Because of the 3-mile minimum and Patrick AFB it is pretty hard to find a good watching place that is actually on the cape.

80 miles for me! I was a Space Shuttle era kid though. Saw the Challenger disaster during my lunchtime. And then on perpetual replay for the rest of the week on WESH/WCPX/WFTV most likely. Even still, just knowing we were launching all those people into space was awe-inspiring.

TBH, I was probably closer to 80 miles than 60 before we moved. to Daytona... Flagler Beach. You?

Heh, Ormond Beach first, then Flagler - Palm Coast (FPC - go, fight, win!)

Funny, I am an FPC Bulldog, class of '80, then moved to Ormond to go to DBCC.

It's even more exciting when you realize that the last crewed mission beyond Low Earth Orbit was 1972 and each person on that spacecraft today are younger than that.

Its going to be a first for me and my son as well. Looking forward to tonight to make an even over it.

> I just missed the original Apollo flights and had assumed I would never see a moon landing in my lifetime.

The PR Chinese might want to go for a significant landing, too, just for the prestige?

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