About a month or so ago, I got a call from Dave.

“What are you doing the first weekend in February?” he asked.

“Nothing that I know of,” I said, though I guessed that was about to change.

“Want to go see the Space Shuttle launch?”

The space shuttle program ends this year and this would be the final night launch of a shuttle ever. Dave had always wanted to see one in person and I thought it sounded like an adventure. So I was in. But I had no idea what I was actually in for.

I’ve got the whole air travel thing down by now. I meet every responsibility as a passenger, handle all the things that are within my power to handle and then adopt a Zen-like calm as I am moved like marble through the Rube Goldberg apparatus of modern air travel.

Eventually I was deposited in Orlando where I took a $55 cab ride to our hotel, a Comfort Inn just on the fringe of the madness, where one could still clearly hear the throbbing Heart of the Mouse. Though Dave had booked the room with a credit card, they would not allow me to check in without a card that could cover the total cost of the room. Times being what they are, I had no such plastic. I notified Dave and he offered reasonable things to say to the hotel clerk. But they were helpless in the face of the System, the hidden computer overlords that hold sway over matters financial. So I waited in the lobby for Dave to arrive. Four hours later.

He found me in front of the television where I had discovered my new guilty pleasure: Legend of the Seeker. I will go into that at another time. Actually, on second thought, we will never discuss it again. We threw our stuff into the room and headed out to forage for food. The fiefdoms surrounding the Magic Kingdom are desolate, post viral outbreak movie back lots during the off season. Everywhere we went we found restaurants open for business, yet empty or occupied by a small cluster of people. Except TGI Friday’s. That place be hoppin. However, we turned away in search of a venue with less shit on the walls.

After devouring all that Sweet Tomatoes had to offer, we hit the 24 hour supermarket, another semi-real waystation, for supplies. The shuttle launch wasn’t until 4:30 AM. We had a long night ahead of us. Laden with a cooler full of beer and energy bars, we returned to the hotel to board the tour bus. It was 9PM.

Dave had secured us passage aboard a massive tour bus operated by a guy named Yunice. I will not attempt to guess his nationality. He had a creative interpretation of grammar and an endearing way of dropping or juxtaposing important details about how the evening would go down. After our initial briefing, the bus rolled out towards the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex, about an hour away.

The parking lot of the Visitor’s Complex was as large as any theme park’s I’d visited. Fleets of tour buses filled one side, civilian vehicles the other. Here we were required to exit the vehicle and gather all of our stowed belongings. The Mexican border, TSA, getting in to a Nine Inch Nails concert… they got nothing on the massive security checkpoint at the Space Center. The vehicles all had to be searched, as did we. In order to go inside what was ostensibly a museum for rockets coupled with a theme park, they had to search all your bags in case you were loaded down with C4.

I looked at the line stretching across the parking lot and into the distance, eventually doubling back on itself. It looked about a mile long. We asked if we could leave the cooler on the bus and were told “no.” This is where we discovered that NASA would not allow any hard sided coolers into the complex. This is also where Dave got into a heated debate with the tour official about the molecular nature of Styrofoam and whether one could truly know if it were soft or hard. The victor of the debate is a matter for philosophers to decide.

We joined the line. No one had a cooler like ours. They all had soft-sided coolers. Every 30 seconds I had to lift the heavy cooler and move along in line. It was cold and windy. I had to pee. I felt like we were being sent into a labor camp. Somewhere in the darkness of the parking lot came the mournful strain of bagpipes. We debated on what to do about the cooler. I was of the opinion that we should make a plan, decide how we would handle it right away. Dave wanted to wait until the last moment when we got all the way inside and then see what happened. That was sort of a theme the entire trip. As we neared the outer courtyard of the Center, a security guard informed us that we could not enter with the cooler. She said we could put the contents into plastic bags and we’d be fine. As long as we didn’t have any alcohol. That night, next to a trash bin, someone discovered an abandoned white Styrofoam cooler containing a bounty of Red Stripe and hard cider.

Some time later we entered a visitor processing gauntlet where we inserted our ticket, went through a metal detector, got wanded and had our possessions thoroughly examined. At that point we were free to “enjoy ourselves”. I imagine at one point the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex was a serious museum chronicling the history of American space flight. A lot of that still exists, though it dwells in the harsh neon splash of the numerous theaters and go-motion space adventure rides. There are even space-themed concession stands and several souvenir stores. Dave and I wandered about, looking at the exhibits and the old rockets. But we were just killing time until we were allowed to board the bus again around 12:45 AM. Keep in mind, it was the middle of the night and we were surrounded by hundreds of people milling about like it was just another day at Disney World.

As the time to re-board the bus approached, we got into another line. To exit. The lines were divided by ticket color. Bearers of Brown or Purple tickets were whisked off to the head of the exit turnstiles while those with green tickets were left to languish in a single fucking line that went from the exit, across the entire plaza, into the “Rocket Garden” exhibit and doubled back to the halfway point. We stood in that line for half an hour. That’s how long it took to walk out of the place.

By 1:15 AM we were back on the bus. Now it would take us out to the causeway, the long stretch of road six miles away from Cape Canaveral. But we saw It long before the bus pulled to a stop. Out the window, the tree line fell away and there was just dark water between us a distant arrow-like shard glowing white on an orange metal platform. The Space Shuttle Endeavour.

Launch was still several hours away, but most of the passengers exited the bus to stand in the cold darkness, huddling with the hundreds of other onlookers. Dave and I decided to stay in the warm bus and try to sleep. I stared out the window at the shuttle. A space ship. Right there. Powerful spotlights illuminated it from every angle, like a rock star.

About 30 minutes before the launch, someone got back on the bus, muttering about the weather. I could hear the live NASA audio feed piped through someone’s radio on the designated AM band. Chances for a launch had dropped from 60% to 30% due to changes in the weather. I looked outside. Clouds. This seemed ridiculous. What was everyone so worried about? Planes took off in worse weather than this and they didn’t have rocket boosters. I waited expectantly, but I already had a growing doubt.

Seven minutes before launch the mission was scrubbed. NASA rescheduled it for the following day. Everyone filed back on board, dejected and disappointed. The bus began the three hour (due to traffic) journey back to the hotel. By the time we arrived it was about 8AM. We had just spent 11 hours to see a space shuttle sit on a launch platform. What had started as a mere curiosity changed into an imperative: I *had* to see the shuttle launch. We’d get another shot the next day. Though at that point, “day” began to hold little meaning as a unit of measure for our two protagonists.

To be continued.