The beginning of a launch day is always very exciting.

There's a lot of anticipation about what's going to happen.

During the first two to three hours of the countdown, we're performing checkout of all the launch vehicle and the payload systems on board.

And we continue the countdown, and at T0, that's the moment of launch, that's what we call it.

We send the electrical current to the igniter and the first stage rocket motor, and that ignites the first stage.

The sounding rocket reaches speeds that exceed the speed of sound, which is about 700 miles

an hour, within a few seconds after launch.

If you blink too fast, you'll miss it.

Then the upper stage continues to burn as we move through the upper atmosphere and we reach

the space environment about one to two minutes after launch, depending on the size of the

vehicle.

You can see the second stage ignite, and then if you pay real close attention, you can actually see the first stage booster reentering back down.

It makes a whistle sound that you can hear.

If you get a nice view through the seaall, you can actually see the first stage impact

the water as it goes into the ocean.

So that's one of my favorite things to do when I go to a launch is to see if I can spot

that booster coming back in and hitting the water. This is NASA's curious universe.

Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

I'm your host, Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

Here at NASA, we do quite a bit of space exploring. We send satellites, astronauts, and

probes out into the solar system to help us learn more about the universe around us. But these

processes all take a pretty long time,

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