Although I only actually went to the Cape once to see a launch close-up. It was one of the early Mars probes (not a Saturn). I was several miles from the pad, (it was a day launch), and the thing that most struck me was how LOUD it was. All you need is one close launch experience to viscerally understand that just getting off the planet at all takes an enormous amount of energy. We are going to need some other kind of propulsion if we ever want to make space travel anything more than a very expensive and wildly extravagant hobby.

When I lived in Tampa, I tried to stay up for the late-night launches. With everyone in bed and traffic down to a minimum, on quiet nights out in the country you could actually hear the rockets taking off. It was a very faint crackling rumble, like continuous distant thunder. Of course, by the time I could actually see the flickering light of the exhaust, the rocket was already in airless, soundless space. What I was hearing was the delayed noise of the liftoff itself.