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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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