Do you talk about space?

[lunait]

I got a nice story that'll warm your heart here.. I live in New Jersey about 2 hours from Wallops, VA where they set up a new launch center. So it was back in September when LADEE was launched. I gathered all my friends and some family together and we all walked out to the soccer field behind my house to watch it take off.

Now I was selling myself short. I thought it was going to be a lame orange star rising into the sky. And this is what I was telling everyone. I was wrong... Very wrong. There were some low level clouds on the horizon and the next thing I knew I was watching a mini sun rise. A firey torch rising into the sky..

Everyone gasped.. and just said "Wooow" with a few 'holy s**t!" In there as well. I myself was blown away at how marvelous the launch was. I let my friends pass around my binoculars and they were loving it. We saw the first stage burn out and I shouted to my buddy with the binoculars who put them down thinking it was over. "No, no follow it follow it!" And just as he found it again the next stage lit up like a small explosion in the night sky. ( LADEE was all solid fuel so it put on quite a show ) Needless to say there was another "holy s**t!" Scream.

We watched it go all the way. We had amassed a small crowd by now and we had people cheering, clapping and laughing.. it was a very inspirational night. My one buddy who was real depressed due to a divorce came up to me shook my hand went in for hug then said to me" I know now why you like this stuff so much.. thank you. That was amazing." Afterwards that's all anyone was talking about days after.

It blew away my expectations and was one of the greatest nights of my life in this hobby.

We even heard it.. truly a beautiful night. The faint crackle of the SRB's. Simply awesome.

This made my day. What an awesome and beautiful story! It reminds me of why I love space and spaceflight. I hope to be able to see something like this one day.

Regarding the thread topic, I guess I'm quite lucky to have friends who are just as nerdy as I am, and we appreciate each others' nerdy interests (space being one of them) and know enough about them that we can talk about it in a good way. Then again, I'm a PhD student in biochemistry, so I guess nerdiness comes with the territory. Most of my other friends and family don't understand what I do for a living anyway, so I'm quite used to it.

Edited January 20, 2014 by lunait

[Comrade Jenkens]

Only one of my friends is interested in space and he also plays KSP. Everyone else including my family is completely non interested.

[Javster]

When I talk about space, people are like

"Yeah?... cool.... uh huh... okay... right... I see... cool..."

I don't think they pay much attention.

Same... :/

[JenBurdoo]

I'm a librarian living in South Florida, working two nights a week. The light pollution is pretty bad, but I am planning a program to at least look at the Moon, Jupiter and Venus, weather permitting -- and the ISS, which according to Heavens-Above is often as bright as or brighter than Jupiter, so I should have a chance. Next flyover is February 4. I would love to run KSP at work -- especially on a screen it would grab the teens' attention -- but right now there's a lockdown on downloading anything due to viruses.

In my last job, I did a children's summer program on the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11. It was also the centennial of Louis Bleriot's flight across the English Channel, so I made it a general aviation/space program. We read the award-winning The Glorious Flight about Bleriot, and a picture book about Armstrong. We had a slideshow of weird-looking planes, made paper airplanes, played youtube space filksongs, and for a craft made edible Galileo probes out of cookies, cupcakes, marshmallows and toothpicks. It was one of the most successful programs I ever did.