Launch Day

Yeah, I'm kind of a big deal.

Cool launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope this morning (I was asleep):

There was another launch on this date in '84:

STS-41-D (formerly STS-14) was the 12th flight of NASA's Space Shuttle program, and the maiden flight of Space Shuttle Discovery. It was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on August 30, 1984, and landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on September 5, 1984. Three commercial communications satellites were deployed into orbit during the six-day mission, and a number of scientific experiments were conducted, including a prototype extendable solar array that would eventually form the basis of the main solar arrays on the International Space Station (ISS).

But wait, there's more!  Another in '83:

STS-8 was the eighth NASA Space Shuttle mission and the third flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It launched on August 30, 1983, and landed on September 5, 1983, conducting the first night launch and night landing of the Space Shuttle program. It also carried the first African-American astronaut to go into space, Guion Bluford. The mission successfully achieved all of its planned research objectives, but was marred by the subsequent discovery that a solid-fuel rocket booster had almost malfunctioned catastrophically during the launch.

I'll ignore the "almost malfunctioned catastrophically" part and turn to John Young for a different danger:

The situation at launch on 30 August turned out to be quite dangerous. Five days earlier, a tropical storm hit the Florida coastline, making landfall just south of KSC. Forecasters had seen the storm coming two days beforehand, but there wasn’t the time to roll Challenger back from the pad. It had to sit there and ride out the storm. Even after the storm was out of the way, the weather caused trouble. Heavy thunderstorms with lightning were in the area. The crew was told they could “man” the shuttle if they wanted to—a risky decision and not one that should ever have been left for the crew to make.

But hey, the crew and vehicle survived, so nothing could possibly go wrong in the future...