Not the person you're replying to, but my dad flew with my brothers down to Florida to watch a couple of the Apollo launches. (He was an engineer for G.E. and had working on some of the video equipment used.)

Wow that must have been awesome to see! I can't imagine how the first few people into space at that time must have thought about it.

He flew with my sister and I down to Flordia to watch STS-02 go up, and then a few years later one of the Challenger flights (not STS-51L, but I

I think the space shuttle was the best looking space vehicle ever designed. I don't like these fancy new things that spacex has made.

launches during the time I was down there. A couple of them I wasn't
even aware of, just walking around outside and looked up and there was a Shuttle blasting off.

I simply can't imagine how it must feel to just be wandering down the street and looking up to see a rocket take off. The closest thing we have here is the local hoon in his hotted up rustbucket tearing up the street :/

... Just another prisoner of gravity!

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I simply can't imagine how it must feel to just be wandering down the
street and looking up to see a rocket take off. The closest thing we
have here is the local hoon in his hotted up rustbucket tearing up the street :/

Yeah, the launch schedule of stuff that *wasn't* Space Shuttle was pretty fast-paced, as well. They'd send up rockets on a (equatorial, I believe?) flight path that literally looked like they were flying horizontal across the sky, not going 'up' like the Shuttle did.

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* Origin: WalledCTTY (21:2/145)

I've always loved the idea of space flight but I just wonder have we (humans)
got our moneys worth from innovations developed in space compared to al money that's gone into space exploration over the years...

Well, depends how you look at that.
Direct money monetized back from the space... I dunno. Hard to calculate money value of knowledge.

But there is a lot of tech invented for space programs and that come from our near/orbital space that we definitively benefit from commercially in a way that may be comparable.

Think about GPS alone as an example.

-h1

... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

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