Atlantis home

Atlantis has landed safely. Hubble servicing mission is finished.
It woke me up coming down.

Atlantis landing had been delayed for two successive days because of weather, so this morning they diverted the landing site to the backup location at Edward's Air Force Base, just over the mountains from where I am.

Atlantis woke me up, the twin sonic booms of the shuttle coming in across the coast going slightly north-to-south and coming in from the west, were right over our house.
Cat was startled awake, and then the children - actually thought it might have been a small earthquake initially till we put it together, and sure enough NASA twitter informed us Atlantis had been diverted to Edward's Air Force Base, the primary alternative landing site, as weather in Florida was still bad and they didn't want to keep them in orbit any longer. Time stamp matched exactly when we heard the boom.

I've been to Edward's for a shuttle landing several times; including for the first post-Challenger mission. JPL used to give out VIP passes to us, and there was a phone tree to let people know deorbit was imminent.
This was always in the middle of the night for some reason.
It was just possible to get from Pasadena to Edward's before the gates were locked if you really hustled; at least one good friend of mine made close acquiantance with some CHiPs en route over the mountains.
The VIP viewing area was a nice stand near the runway and we used to be allowed down to the end of the runway by the control building after the Shuttle had stopped.

Had some memorable trips, including an early date with my now wife, with both of us piled into a very small car all night.
On another occasion the landing rolled the shuttle right out to the edge of the runway, I had given a friend of mine a ride up, and as we were leaving he told me to turn left, down a different road - he had spotted a side road that took us right up to the shuttle, on the other side of the runway fence - we then stopped while he took close ups with his rather fancy SLR, with a large zoom lens.
Unfortunately the base patrol was not amused by people driving down a restricted road and pointing long tubes at their shuttle, and the next thing we knew a helicopter was hovering about 10m in front of us, pointing an even longer machine gun at us and politely asking for an explanation.
Turns out ducking for cover is the wrong reflex move in this situation...
However, in those more innocent times we did not end up prematurely enacting "Little Brother", we just explained we were from Caltech and taking photos and drove off, after they had suggested this was not a sensible thing to do.

Good times.

MSNBC landing video

Earlier interview with cool pictures and snappy quotes