Shuttle Launch

I made sure I was around the TV to watch the final launch of the space shuttle Atlantis. Fox has freakin cameras on it and you could see the curvature of the Earth from it 3.5 minutes after launch. It reached velocities topping 10000 ft/s at an altitude of around 350,000 ft. It accelerated the entire way. Probably don't have enough computing power in my departmentally approved calculator in order to fathom the power it takes to accelerate that much mass that quickly. At one point it traveled about 10 miles in under 30s. Simply amazing.

Now we just lost the main fuel tank that the camera was attached to and got to see the shuttle separate from it with the curvature of the Earth in the background. You could see some gaseous fluid moving across the wing that was in view. The engines had already been shut off so I imagine I was viewing some rarefied air high on the edge of the atmosphere. Simply amazing.