6 Years ago today, the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on STS-135, the final mission of the Space Shuttle program. I wrote an entry last year, but incidentally, for whatever reason, didn’t include launch video. No idea why, but I’m rectifying that now.
The Space Shuttle is the most-flown American manned launch system – 135 launches over a span of 30 years – it’s launch procedure is a process I know pretty well, and of course am quite fond of, for what it is. STS-135 was my last chance to get to watch a launch live (on TV, anyway) after years of, for whatever reason, missing out on launches (usually due to TV covering being almost non-existent of them through even the late 2000’s, and as sad as it was to see, I still loved getting that final chance to see not just any given Orbiter, but my favorite one, Atlantis, head to space one last time.
Anyway, the focus here is the launch – I simply wanted to share the best quality video I could find on the launch, and I feel I’ve found it – the only thing is, there is quite a bit of dead time in the final pre-launch procedures which while interesting to me, might not be to most others.
A video on the NASA Youtube channel does a better job at getting to the launch, but it’s nowhere near as good quality, so as I do sometimes, I’m sharing both clips for you.
First off, the full “good” video – 1080P, 60 Frames Per Second:
And here the NASA video, which is the same as the above but starts at 30 seconds before launch rather than 9 minutes: