I’m a week or so behind the curve with this item, but these days I seem to be running late all the time anyway, so what’s one more item on the overdue list?

It seems that when the space shuttle Discovery lifted off on the Fourth of July, it carried a new feature: webcams attached to the nose and tail of both solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. (For those who aren’t up on their spaceflight trivia, the SRBs are the skinny rockets attached to the sides of the thing that provide the initial lift-off boost; they separate a few minutes into the flight, after they’ve burned out all — well, most — of their fuel, and drop into the ocean, where they’re recovered to be used again.) While I suspect the cams are part of the post-Columbia paranoia protocol, intended to document any potential damage during the launch phase, they have the positive side-effect of providing some unprecedented and seriously cool video of a process we’ve all seen 121 times now. Click the image below to see Discovery throttling up its own on-board engines and pulling away as the SRB separates:

Just like a Viper peeling off on the old Battlestar series, isn’t it? Makes an old geek’s heart swell to see reality reflecting fantasy like this…

Note: more images and videos from the current mission can be found at NASA’s Web site. If you’re into this sort of thing…