As you are aware the shuttle fleet is going to be retired soon, sometime in the up coming year (?) The news says we will have several years to wait for the next space craft to come out. With this line of space craft coming to it's time for retirement, NASA has definitely had some of the prettiest launches in years.

I have lived in Florida since I was 6 years old, move here in 1978. Those doing the math 31 year resident, yes 37 and proud. I have been in Martin County growing up watching shuttles going up, then later in the life of the Shuttle program hearing and feeling them land. I've seen the good launches and unfortunately the bad. I have done all this watching from my front yard, walking between class at school and even from the beach but I have never seen it from the launch area. You know, honestly I don't really want to go there to watch. It would be great but there is nothing better then to know that every Shuttle I have seen I have seen from the comfort of my home town.

The latest launch on March 16th was the most elementally beautiful I have ever seen. At first it appeared to look much like all others I have seen (with exception of one and I always say a pray as it rises into to my sight) This one was different in the way the sun's last rays of the day hit the trail of puffy white cloud like path the shuttle laid behind it. Nature took over and painted it with a vibrant display of oranges, reds and pinks...and then just as the shuttle put distance between itself and it's now spectacular trail the sky became darker so you could just see it as a point of light just the size of a star , in the night sky, then you could see 2 slightly smaller points of lights separate and start to fall away. My family and I could no longer see the shuttle itself, so I returned to putting dinner on the table and then I stepped back outside to gather up my children and then looked a the sky to see the remnants of the trail and it was as white and bright as a cloud could get on a navy black sky and all I could think is that nature and man should work together more often to create beauty like that....