Southeast students view shuttle on screen after delay ends trip

After three tries and six days of waiting, Southeast Missouri State University physics professor John Tansil and a group of physics students finally got to see the space shuttle Endeavour lift off Wednesday afternoon.

Only instead of watching it from an observation deck three miles away, they watched it on a large projection screen from 941 miles away in a Rhodes Hall computer lab.

"Well, it was only six days late," said Tansil. "It's disappointing that we weren't there, but you just never know what will happen."

Tansil, who usually doesn't make a fuss about shuttle launches, said he took a particular interest in this one because Cape County native and Southeast graduate Linda Godwin was aboard.

"I normally don't watch them, but this one was a big deal," he said. "The only reason I got excited was because Godwin was on board."

Senior Jason Alexander, a physics major, smiled and clapped as he watched the shuttle lift off and make its way through the sky.

"It was definitely not as good as it would have been if we were there," he said.

Alexander said the cameras were filming from an area similar to where they would have been if they had been in Florida for the launch, but it just wasn't the same.

"There's just no way to compare being there in person to watching it on a screen," he said.