A view of downtown Seattle from the water.

We're taking a Harbor Cruise of Seattle's Elliott Bay.

Enron founder Ken Lay has died in Aspen, Colorado, a spokesman for Lay's family said today. Lay was awaiting sentencing after being found guilty of conspiracy and fraud. Visit CNN for the latest.

The News Herald newspaper of Panama City, FL has a photo of me watching Discovery launch yesterday.

[First, an irrelevant aside, for the scroll-weary: Don’t miss guestblogger Sean Sullivan’s awesome Shuttle coverage!]

Well, we made it. Exactly 40 hours and 20 minutes after pulling out of L.A.’s Union Station — and nearly six hours behind schedule — our train arrived at Seattle’s King Street Station at 2:28 AM today. We’re now at our Motel 6 (after getting a cab ride from a hilariously stereotypical anti-Bush stoner) and are settling in for a long-awaited sleep on an actual bed. Tomorrow (er, later today): the Space Needle!

The train trip was totally worth doing, IMHO. It had its frustrating moments (not so much the delays, which were expected, but some customer-service snafus — more on those in due course — and a few unpleasant travelling companions), but overall it was very fun. Would I do it again? Probably not, but it was great to do once, and now I can cross it off my life’s to-do list. :) As an added bonus, it was awesome to finish the trip on the 4th of July; we must have seen a dozen separate fireworks shows as we passed through the Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA area. Very cool.

Anyway, here are a few of my pictures from Tuesday. Stay tuned for more, higher-resolution photos, eventually.

Mount Shasta, California, in the early-morning light. Shasta is a 14,162-foot stratovolcano.

Another view of Mount Shasta, a little later and from a different angle.

The Shasta Valley.

Me and the train at Klamath Falls, Oregon.

The Pacific Parlour Car — for sleeper-car passengers only. I passed through en route back to coach after they let me onto one of the front cars at Klamath Falls because I was in some danger of missing the train otherwise. (I had been wandering up and down the train, taking pictures.)

Upper Klamath Lake, with the 9,495-foot stratovolcano Mount McLoughlin in the distance.

Crossing the Williamson River. (Stupid-ass power lines.)

A tunnel in the Cascades, seen out the back window of the rear train car.

Pine trees… lots and lots of pine trees.

Even Spiderman couldn’t make the train run on time.

Sunset over central Oregon.

The Portland train station.

Again, a major shout-out to Lee Groth’s The Milepost and John Pitt’s USA by Rail, our indispensible travel guides for this train adventure. Also, a shout-out to Becky, for humoring me by coming along on this trip in the first place, and for putting up with my general dorkiness throughout the train ride. :) She had a good time too, I think! Oh, and a hat tip to the 10-year-old kid sitting across the aisle from us, who informed us that the train’s nickname is the “Coast Starlate.” Heh.

To view all of my posts about the trip, visit the West Coast Trip 2006 category.

We're finally here!

Fireworks in Portland, Oregon, as seen from the pedestrian bridge over the train station:

Awesome! Who knew that 6 1/2 hours late could qualify as “perfect timing”? :)

Also, as promised, our train appeared on the Brooklyn Rail Yard webcam as we passed through Portland. I was watching live on my laptop via cell phone (several interested fellow passengers were watching over my shoulder, too), and I captured screenshots, which can be seen after the jump.

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Live webcam views here.

We are once again stopped in our tracks, waiting for Union Pacific trains to get out of our way. This is why Amtrak trains are often so late: freight trains get right-of-way once we fall even a little
behind schedule, causing a domino effect of delays.

We’re now officially more than five hours behind schedule… let’s hear it for Amtrak! :) Becky and I are having a great time, though. (Some of our fellow passengers are more upset about the delay, but we planned for its near-inevitability from the get-go.)

Anyway, we should be arriving in Portland sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 PM — right about the time we were scheduled to be in Seattle! Heh. You may be able to watch us via webcam here.

Space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale gave a press conference describing NASA’s initial assessment of external tank performance during today’s launch. The overall assessment is very favorable, both for this flight and future flights.

As NASA expected, foam was lost during launch. Five “events” were detected photographically. All events happened more than two minutes into flight, when the shuttle was at a very high altitude. For Discovery, this is good because in vacuum, the foam drifted slowly away from the tank. Even large pieces of foam lost after T+2:15 aren’t a safety hazard. The problem with foam is when it’s lost in the atmosphere, and can be turned into a high-velocity projectile by the supersonic wind surrounding the shuttle during ascent.

For future missions, the late loss of foam is considered excellent news. Apparently there were several hypothesized mechanisms for foam loss, and today’s data indicate that the primary mechanism may be something related to vacuum, which doesn’t pose a risk in future flights.

Of course, this is all preliminary information. NASA will be going over Discovery’s thermal protection system with a painstaking photographic survey, going over today’s launch photography in extensive detail, and then going back to understanding foam loss in more depth based on the new information.

In other news, I retrieved my remote cameras from the launch pad area, and everything worked! The photo above was taken by a wide-angle digital camera, unmanned at launch time, triggered by the sound of the launch. The photo below shows me servicing the camera system yesterday. The camera on the left took the photo above; the camera on the right (visible in the wide-angle shot) was a telephoto film camera, it took 36 exposures but it hasn’t been developed yet. The equipment was set up on Friday morning, and spent about 103 hours in the field, through both scrubs and the actual launch.

We just left Eugene, Oregon -- home of the Ducks -- now more than 4 1/2 hours late. After a long period of cell-phone silence, we're back to civilization, so I've just learned about the Space Shuttle,
the North Korean missile, and Italy beating Germany.

North Korea test-fires at least three missiles, one of them a long-range weapon that the U.S. has been monitoring, U.S. sources say. Visit CNN for the latest.

North Korea has test-launched a missile but not the long-range weapon that the U.S. has been monitoring, sources tell CNN. Visit CNN for the latest.

Discovery launched on schedule this afternoon, and is now in orbit. On Thursday, the shuttle will dock with the space station. I watched liftoff through binoculars, and the sense of time changes in unusual ways. The six seconds between main engine start and liftoff seemed to take forever, and then the launch itself seemed to pass quickly — probably because there really isn’t time to let the experience sink in. The brilliant intensity of the flame is what really caught my attention. Within a minute, the shuttle is pretty far downrange.

The sound seems like the most intense part of the experience, perhaps because photographs are everywhere, but the pounding vibration is something that can’t be captured in the same way. Even from my vantage point, three miles from the launch pad, the sound washes over everything. But since sound travels at five miles a second, the first 15 seconds of the launch are totally silent. Only at that point does the sound of main engine start arrive.

After watching liftoff in binoculars, I took a few photos and watched by eye until SRB (solid rocket booster) separation, and I went back to binoculars at that point. The sky was really clear, and I could see SRB separation better than on most of my previous launches. I was able to follow Discovery until T+5:15 in binoculars, the longest I’ve ever tracked a daytime launch. Then I looked back to the sky, and saw the cloud produced by the launch … the shuttle’s main engines burn hydrogen and oxygen, and make a lot of water vapor. In addition, there’s some acid in the clouds due to exhaust from the solid rocket boosters. Here’s what the clouds looked like from the press site:

And a view of these clouds with the Vehicle Assembly Building (the large object on the left is the back side of the countdown clock):