Cool

Here's the vid of the shuttle Endeavour going up yesterday, complete with on-board camera shots of all three boosters breaking away. (You have to wait till the very end for separation of the big central tank.)

Personally, I've long viewed the shuttle as a near-useless boondoggle. Nonetheless, I still get the chills watching a lift-off, much the way I imagine somebody might have felt watching a sailing ship pushing off for the horizon on a voyage of exploration back in the day.

I hope that in my lifetime NASA will scrap this low earth orbit mucking about and start dreaming big again - colonies on the Moon and Mars, ever more comprehensive probes of the rest of the Solar System and beyond. Either that, or else that it will just get the hell out of the way and allow private enterprise to do its stuff.