http://msnbc.com/modules/spaceshuttle/discoverylaunch/

This allows you to select up to three camera angles at a time (there are 11 to choose from) to watch the launch simultaneously. It's a lot of fun.

The current drama is, they are examining the footage from the 100 or so cameras to figure out what one pice of debris that was seen is. It may be a part of a tile. Also seen in the footage was what appeared to be a piece of insulating foam from the fuel tank (which is what hit Columbia causing the fateful damage), but it didn't hit the shuttle. And apparantly the cone took a bird out on the way up. :birdy:

Part of the problem with determining if that bit of debris is something to worry about is that they've never seen the shuttle from those angles during that part of its flight. So they have no concept of "normal" debris to draw a reference from.

When I was in elementary school I lived in central Florida, close enough to Cape Canaveral to see the Saturn V rocket carrying either Voyager or Voyager II take off. It is a great sight.

I saw them putting Apollo 13 together when I liven in Florida - that thing was big. Very sorry it never made it to the moon.

All this time down, and it's still the same shuttle!! Where are all the amazing effects?!? :p

LOL....hopefullt it is safer, but debris is still falling off onto the tiles...hope it makes it back safely..:)

C'mon, the thing hit a bird? Do you know how hard it is to target a bird in flight with a Space Shuttle - let alone capture it on camera.

No doubt, Tigerlily. The last shuttle had an astronaut from Spokane- his parents still live here, and it was heartbreaking to see their last pictures of their son. (They had them developed in Eric's old lab shortly after the memorial). Most of the pics were from the pre-flight festivities and such, and their son was so incredibly excited to be going.

You gotta have the right pair of glasses...

Sopme interesting new info about the debris -

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050727/D8BJECR80.html

"In uneasy reminders of the Columbia accident, a thermal tile apparently got chipped..."

Yeah, but they've seen litereally thousands of damanged thermal tiles on past shuttles with no problem. The difficulty will be determining if this is the right (wrong?) kind of damage to worry about.