I was fortunate enough to witness three space shuttle launches in person before the shuttle program came to a close in July 2011. They were STS-101 (Atlantis) on May 19, 2000, STS-109 (Columbia) on March 1, 2002 and STS-132 (Atlantis) on May 14, 2010.

Living here in the north central Texas area has also proved to be a good place to view re-entry landing ground tracks for space shuttle’s deorbiting and returning to the Kennedy Space Center. I bet I have seen 8-10 early morning re-entries through the years, and each was as exciting to watch as the last.

Click on a mission patch below to be taken to pages where you can view the images I captured of those launches.