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Originally Posted by crockett
My grandfather worked there on the generator repair crew. Had access to pretty much anywhere on the cape. One of my uncle's worked at the NASA press room. My step father was on the Shuttle recovery team and also the launch prep team. (helped suit up the astronauts on the prep team, and was later on the recovery team for remote landings)
My aunt worked for various contractors but most recently space x, but she just retired. Needless to say I saw a lot of the early shuttle launches when I was a kid on the cape. Like everyone up to something like STS 22 or somewhere around there.
I was born in Melbourne, so I grew up on the space coast. I actually watched the Challenger blow up from the window of my history class.
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Actually a family legacy in the space program was pretty common lots of people I knew had brothers and father and mothers who were there for the Apollo program or whatever I lived on Cocoa beach just north of Patrick AFB.
For STS51L (Challenger) I was still in Huntsville at Marshal SFC and Redstone Arsenal when it went bad it opened a door of opportunity to replace a lot of old systems and thats basically what moved me there.
It was the most fun place I ever worked hands down, engineering on a very impressive scale. Along with your family I had to have a lot of "training" as well because I had access to The launch Control center, The Pads, The VAB all four firing rooms (3&4 were DOD and required the clearance) Flight Crew Training and the scariest one to me, the Hypergol Facility.
Fun times but so easy to burn out...