Hacker News Reader

Comment by WatchDog | Hacker News Reader

I was also at the same viewing area. Keep in mind that people had been in Florida for days longer than they expected, and had spent half the previous day sitting around waiting for the launch to happen.

View on HN

Yeah, when I was there for the inaugural FH launch we were up at 5am, at KSC by 6, and then I think the launch was at around 4pm.

The idea of another 10+ hours baking in the Florida sun...

(But, seriously, no one there would have preferred an unsafe launch. For us, the booing was targeted toward high atmospheric winds!)

I'm planning to take the family for the FH launch expected in June. Seriously considering the "Feel the Heat" package, but wondering if it will be too loud for the littles (2 and 6)? Obviously they'd wear proper hearing protection, but would it still be too loud/intense?

I had my five with me (all under ten). We debated endlessly about whether to buy nasa tickets until they were sold out. We flew down the morning of (this was the demo flight last year) - and by 10 am we were in the vicinity of the launch area. Since we didn’t have tickets we evaluated some of the bridge locations but finally decided if it didn’t launch we’d rather make it a day at the beach rather than hang out alongside a highway. Three things to note: 1) the beach area had terrible internet. Most of the time twitter wouldn’t load so it was hard to know exactly what was happening. 2) you have a pretty good shot of the landing zones when the rockets return - better than inside ksc I’ve read, 3) if we hadn’t been staying in the hotel it would have been several hours of traffic after the launch. As it was we took the kids to the pool and ate dinner poolside but we could see the road outside was packed for easily two hours post launch.

Same! My wife and I had the feel the heat tickets. We woke up at 5AM on launch day and didn't get to the Apollo / Saturn V center until around 11am. The line was crazytown.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com