Atlantis Launch Notes: July 8, 9:00 P.M.

What a day it was. One to which I’ll dedicate lots of long-term memory neurons. It started tough, though--at 3:30 A.M., with a four-hour trip to the Kennedy Space Center 45 miles away. On the day that my still sleepy eyes would witness a spaceship rocket into the heavens, they would first have to focus for two hours on the bleak behind of a tour bus moving at 0.5 kilometer per hour (slower than the crawler-transporter that hauls the shuttle to the launch pad).