Blast Off !

Scottsmoor, Florida
April 5, 2010

One of my most vivid memories is watching the launch of the Skylab 3 manned mission on July 28, 1973 at 7:11 a.m. I can still see the Saturn rocket scream through the southeast skies with a rumble and smoke following its trail. It was a sight that this young boy had not even come close to seeing in his 12 years. How was I to know I would see many, many more launches of spacecraft in my subsequent eight years at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The space shuttle program is coming to a close by the end of the year, and there will only be four more launches. Opportunity presented itself, and I continued eastwards to the Space Coast of Florida to see the second-to-last launch of the shuttle Discovery. I also continued eastwards to relive a memory.

The launch of the Discovery was scheduled for 6:21 a.m. the next morning, around a half hour before sunrise. I wanted to get a closer look at the launch and was planning to see it from the waterfront of Titusville. After a short night of sleep in Daytona Beach, I headed south down the coast to Titusville. However, as I approached Titusville, I noticed that a lot of people had the same idea, especially those coming from Orlando. Gridlock on the roads was already in place, and I turned my truck around and drove north for Plan B.

The Road to Lompoc

Santa Barbara County, California
August, 1973

Gaviota Pass in 2010, looking north

We had been on the road for four days, and we were about to drive through our first tunnel. After driving 2,670 numbing miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, it did not take much to animate three kids in the back seat of a Vista Cruiser station wagon. However, it was the sign just after the tunnel through Gaviota Pass that excited all of us:  Lompoc Next Exit. Our travels were about to come to an end.

Lompoc and Vandenberg Air Force Base have had a close relationship for over 50 years now. It has been a way of life for military families to move their lives from one base to another and another, and thousands of families accomplished the same journey to Vandenberg Air Force Base as my family did in August 1973. Because our expedition from Hahn Air Base in Germany to Vandenberg had eye-opening layovers in London and Florida, we probably took a little bit longer than most families in getting from their old base to Vandenberg. After eight weeks in transit, we were still in Florida, and the last part of our adventures entailed a cross-country drive in our just-bought station wagon. This drive would be the end to our assignment in Germany which started eerily enough with a cross-country drive from the Mojave Desert of California to New Jersey only four years earlier.