The Space Shuttle Came Home

We were watching Nasa TV on cable this afternoon, wondering when the space shuttle was going to land, when we saw that the weather at the landing zone was a bit too strong and they told the shuttle to take another lap. I checked the new approach vector and realized that this time, it would bring the shuttle practically over the Sarasota / Bradenton area.

Unfortunately though, I didn't know what the altitude would be, so the cloud cover looked like we would have no better than even odds if we went down there to try and photograph the approach. Disregarding the odds, we jumped into the station wagon and headed down to Fort Desoto so we could stand on the shore gun battery in order to be on the tallest structure on Fort Desoto Beach.

Well, we discovered that the space shuttle's sonic booms could definitely be heard from Fort Desoto, but the cloud cover made it hard to see anything at all. As you can see in the first picture below, it shows how bad the surf was, as the tug boat works to get the equipment barge out of the storm. You can see how overcast it was from the tug boat to us, so we didn't stand a chance of getting a shot of something several miles up in the sky. We were able to get a couple of neat pictures of some porpoises playing in the surf though, but the overcast, cloudy day just wasn't going to let us have a glimpse of the shuttle.