In 1969, people lined the beaches around Cape Canaveral to watch the Saturn V carry Apollo 11 toward the moon, a plume of smoke visible for miles and a roar that reportedly rattled windows in towns nearby.
These days, the crowds are still there, just watching a different kind of spectacle. Reusable rocket boosters now return from orbit and land themselves upright on a drone ship or a pad just a few miles from where those Apollo missions launched, something that would have sounded like science fiction to the people watching in 1969.
Same stretch of Florida coastline, same sense of a crowd holding its breath, just a completely different era of what’s actually happening in the sky. Have you ever watched a launch from the beach, then or now?
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