With her solid rocket boosters burning a brilliant orange against a steel-blue late-afternoon sky, the space shuttle Discovery lifted off today on her final voyage before retirement. Discovery is the workhorse of the shuttle fleet with 38 prior missions to her credit, including the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, the final docking mission with the old Russian station Mir, and a return to space for Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. Discovery was also the first shuttle to fly again after both the Challenger and Columbia disasters. I think it’s fair to say that the good ship Discovery is something special among the shuttle fleet.

The current mission, designated STS-133 in NASA-speak, is yet another trip to the International Space Station where Discovery will deliver the inelegantly named Permanent Multipurpose Module and various supplies and spare parts. Also along for the ride is a humanoid robot called Robonaut 2, or R2 for short, which is intended to help engineers study how such robots function in space. Hopefully, R2 will someday assist the station’s crew with repair work and scientific experiments. (R2 is actually pretty interesting; it has highly dexterous human-shaped hands and looks like something out of one of our favorite sci-fi movies. No, not Star Wars… actually this thing reminds me more of the sentry robots from The Black Hole, minus the double-barreled laser guns and the permanent bad attitudes.)

One interesting trivia note for this flight: one of the mission specialists, astronaut Steve Bowen, flew on Atlantis last May during the STS-132 mission, making him the first astronaut ever to fly back-to-back missions. (This wasn’t exactly planned; it came about because he had to replace a guy who was injured in a bicycle accident.)

If anyone’s interested, the official NASA video of this picture-perfect launch, from main-engine start to external fuel-tank separation, is below the fold:

I imagine most people probably have had enough somewhere around the SRB separation, but I’m the kind who watches these videos all the way through, savoring every moment of the shuttle’s climb up out of Earth’s gravity well. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I’m really going to miss these birds.

You know, it occurs to me just how much access the general public now has to spaceflight operations via the Internet and ubiquitous, high-quality video coverage. It’s really remarkable when I think about it. The earliest shuttle launches usually had several hours of live television coverage, both before and after lift-off, but from what I recall, it was quite remote from the action, with the cameras placed well away from the pad complex and not much of a glimpse at what the astronauts were actually up to.

The situation got worse when shuttle flights became more-or-less routine, and we were lucky to see 20 seconds of launch footage on the nightly news. And the sound and video quality was pretty low, too.

But now, thanks to technology and NASA’s cooperativeness, we space buffs can see pretty much the whole thing, from the time the astronauts wake up in the morning onward. I had my Internet browser tuned to NASA TV for a good part of the day, and even though I couldn’t actually watch — due to being at work and all — I listened to the audio feed, keeping constant tabs on how things were going via the smooth voice of Mission Control speaking in my headphones. To be honest, that was almost better than watching the video. The experience of listening to the preparations felt weirdly intimate. I felt like an insider, as if I were actually at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, helping out in some capacity instead of sitting in a cubicle 1,500 miles to the west, looking for jargony words that needed to be hyphenated. As when you’re reading a good novel, I projected myself into the action even as I continued with my mundane activities. I experienced a growing excitement as the countdown went on. I felt twinges of sadness as the Mission Control voice called out various ground crew by name and mentioned that they, too, would be retiring after this mission, their era over and their time finished. And I sweated through the impossibly tense situation that occurred around T-minus five minutes, when the eastern range controller had a computer problem and called for a hold. Less than three minutes of hold time were available before Discovery lost its launch window for today, and it came right down to the wire before Range finally called in with a “go.”

Oh, I confess that I sneaked occasional peeks, too… I saw the “astrovan” carrying the crew out to Pad 39A, and the astronauts in the “white room” high atop the gantry, preparing to enter their ship. I watched the commander climb laboriously into his seat, which was of course laying with its back down at the time.

I watched intently from about T-minus 30 down, basically what you see in the YouTube clip here, and I have to say there’s really not much comparison with the old days. There are so many more cameras around the pad and the shuttle itself, and they’re placed at such better, more dramatic angles than they used to be. And the video quality is so much higher as well. Even the sound is better than I remember it used to be. The hair on my arms stood up when the igniters started throwing their sheets of sparks beneath the shuttle’s main engines, with an electrical buzz that sounds like it belongs in an old Frankenstein film. And then the noise of the SRBs, not just an undifferentiated roar like I always used to believe, but a crackling, snapping, organic cacophony, like something alive and wild and straining to be let off its chain. God, I love this stuff. I don’t think I realized how much I loved it until the end of the program grew near. Now, with only two more flights — I’ve recently learned there will be an STS-135 after all, one more than I believed the last time I wrote about this subject — I’m savoring all of it. Even a clip I just saw on NASA TV of the floodlamps in the shuttle’s payload bay being switched off struck me as just plain cool (of course, that was helped along by the growing sunrise across the curve of the Earth, just like at the end of Superman: The Movie, but still…).

STS-133 is scheduled to last 11 days. The next flight after that, STS-134, will be shuttle Endeavour, scheduled to go in April. And then STS-135 — the true final mission, carried out by shuttle Atlantis — is supposed will happen in late June.