Soyuz Launch -- Up Close and Personal
My museum client (http://www.discoverytours.org) is organizing a repeat of this trip for this September,
and I will again be the tour 'expert-in-residence' (http://discoverytours.org/tours/search.php?sear=61).
‘Every launch is like the first one’
What it's like to witness a spaceship set off for the space station
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12042803/

By James Oberg
NBC News space analyst
Special to MSNBC
Updated: 8:24 p.m. ET March 27, 2006

Editor's Note: On Wednesday night EST (Thursday morning local time), a Soyuz rocket is set to blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for the international space station. Aboard will be Brazil's first astronaut and two men replacing the current crew. NBC News space analyst James Oberg was there in Baikonur last October when the current crew blasted off and recalls here what it's like to see such a launch close up.

The sun had risen an hour earlier, in the east where it was supposed to, and it was shining normally off to our right. But now a very convincing replica was rising with startling speed directly in front of us, accompanied by a very un-sunlike thunder of a thousand waterfalls that rattled the coins in our pockets and made impossible any verbal communication of our sudden awe.