The Discovery Launch!!

It looked beautiful! I know, other people call flowers beautiful rather than a massive space shuttle leaving the earth with a hell of a huge exhaust plume, but to me, this launch was perfect.. it's at least as fascinating as flowers, come on, you must admit that!
Watch Discovery blast off from Cape Canaveral (and tell me you didn't like it afterwards!):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4716463.stm
The crew consists of seven people, the commander being a woman called Eileen Collins who says she's always wanted to be a teacher.. nevermind, just become an astronaut instead, not that much of a difference, really, is it?!
Of course, the NASA team is quite full of self-praise now. Not to forget Mr (eh, President) Bush: "Our space programme is a source of great national pride, and this flight is an essential step toward our goal of continuing to lead the world in space science, human spaceflight, and space exploration." Luckily he remembered to add these last few words to his sentence and didn't just stop after "lead the world"...
Apparently it didn't all go as smoothly as it looked like, though, because some pieces of the insulating foam covering the tank have come off during the start, the same thing had happened 2 1/2 years ago to the Colombia space shuttle when the foam hit the shielding tiles which led to the Colombia's explosion when reentering the earth atmosphere.. so this is what NASA has been eagerly working on since then, just to discover the same problem happening again! The poor astronauts have to stay crammed in the International Space Station now until their colleagues manage to come and pick them up..
I bet some highly developed and intelligent creatures watch us human beings down on earth struggling to send a shuttle up safely, thinking how primitive our technologies still are ;)