We woke up at around 2PM on Sunday. After some discussion it was decided that we were going to make another attempt to see the shuttle launch. Neither of us was up for another 11 hour ordeal on the tour bus, not to mention the $110 it would cost for new tickets.

Instead Dave would rent a car and we could drive to the Visitor Center a few hours before launch and see it from there. He made a few calls and got only insane prices for 2 days’ rental. Finally, Dollar rental came through. They could hook us up for just $80. We started walking to the hotel where the rental place was located. Along the way Dave tried to get $20 temporarily added to his credit card. You see, even though the rental was only $80, the rental place needed a card with a lot more available credit to secure it and Dave was $20 short. As we walked, he talked with several bank agents on the phone, getting disconnected each time.

Dave was still on hold by the time we made it to the Dollar rental desk inside the swank hotel. The place was going to close in 15 minutes. He decided to have them run the card anyway. It was declined. $20 short. Dave explained that he was about to get an extension, but the agent explained that once a card is declined it is locked out of the system for 24 hours. Could the car be secured with cash? No. A debit card? Only if it had a Visa logo on it. Was there anyone we could speak to? No. Another underling whose hands were tied by the System, the secret computer masters. A short while later, his $20 authorization came through.

We moved to the lobby to regroup. Dave called the tour bus company. It would be grueling ordeal, but we had no other options. The bus was already full. At this point I had given up hope of seeing the launch. I started speculating about where we could have a nice dinner. Dave got up and made a phone call. After a while he came back with Plan C: We’d use the airport shuttle tickets meant for our return trip and go to the airport where the car rental places were still open. In fact, he had already secured a car with Enterprise.

We had time to walk into Downtown Disney and grab dinner at Bongos, a Cuban restaurant created by Gloria Estefan, part of which was inside a giant pineapple. We hiked back to the hotel, hopped on the shuttle just as the Saints were winning the Superbowl and rode to the airport. There Dave picked out a shiny silver VW Beetle with only 18 miles on it and we were off. Dave drove the Beetle as he drove his own BMW, which is to say at terrifying speed.

We checked in at the Visitor Center to see how long they would be open to traffic. We still had a few hours. So we headed over to Titusville, the town across the water. As we drove along the main drag we saw cars parked along the side of the road, in every parking lot or patch of grass. Titusville offered a view of the shuttle just as majestic as the one from the causeway. We found an optimal viewing point at a sort of astronaut history park with a pier jutting into the water. We’d watch the launch from here, not the Center. Marking this in our memory, we went to kill time at a Waffle House.

Cut to 4AM. We were standing near the edge of the park, surrounded by tons of people and several television crews. Dave had set up a telescope which he’d bought from the nearby CVS. A man had set up a media tent with a monitor displaying the live feed from mission control. Whatever the astronauts knew, we knew. The sky was cloudy again, a 60% chance for condition Green. Throughout the day we had heard banter pertaining to the only two shows that mattered: Were the Saints in the lead? and Was Endeavour Red or Green? Endeavour had been like a traffic light all evening, going green, then red, then green again.

We passed T-10. Everyone was tense. Would it get scrubbed again? T-7. People starting yelling at the assholes next door and at the end of the pier to turn off their bright lights. Light pollution. Around T-3 the consensus was that everything was go. An excited murmur moved through the crowd.

A few minutes later someone shouted “There it goes!” I could see clouds of flame blossoming at the base of the shuttle, far, far away. I had cobbled together an expectation based on stock footage and my own imagination. I waited for this same scene to play out before me. I had no idea that my expectations were so low.

Imagine a dark night sky. Clear on the horizon, rising up to meet a greyish wash of clouds. And then, at the center of the horizon, an atomic bomb explodes. It was like the sun rising in the space of five seconds. The entire sky turned to day. The Endeavour rose up on a column of jagged flame, arcing into the sky. As it rose, it illuminated the surrounding clouds which whorled around it in a way that was so beautiful and perfect it was hard to believe someone had not composited it on a computer. Any photo snapped at that moment would have been worthy of Time magazine. And then the boom hit, waves of thunder over the water, shaking the earth. It was the most astonishing man-made event I have ever witnessed.

Then it was just a point of blue light, one star among many. The very idea of the shuttle hit me, the achievement of it, something I had taken for granted. There were now six humans who weren’t on the planet. They were en route to a dock with a space station. My heart was rocketing alongside them as I thought Go, Go, Go.

There will be four more shuttle launches and eventually other craft will take to space. But that was the last space shuttle night launch ever. I was there.

I tried to find a video that does it justice, but found none. I had to settle for this: