After a little exercise and clock-watching, launch time gets closer and you get more uptight, she said. You put on your long underwear and get into a partial pressure suit, a bulky, orange affair that comes with a parachute harness assembly, parachute pack, communications gear, diaper, helmet, gloves and boots.

"And suddenly the cameras are there, and it's going out on NASA TV, and you're waving and saying, 'Hi, mom,' and thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I'm really going to go do this,' " Melroy said. "And then you walk out, and you get in this crew transport vehicle, and as you drive towards the pad, people fade away.

"You start to realize that everybody else is turning back except you. You're the only crazy one headed straight for this giant ticking bomb out on the pad, and it's just you and your crew, and you all kind of look at each other and think, you know, this is it. It's just us now."

"Watching out the window of the astrovan as we approached the pad, I admired the beauty of the shuttle vehicle," International Space Station resident Peggy Whitson wrote in one of her letters home. "The vertical, sweeping lines of the orbiter, the SRBs (solid rocket boosters) on either side and the liquid fuel tank in the center gave me the sense that it wanted to leap into the sky. Up close, with the liquid hydrogen and oxygen loaded into the tanks, the vehicle hissed and groaned, as if also anticipating the countdown."

Experienced astronauts told Whitson she would feel a blend of excitement and fear. "I didn't feel any fear, only the excitement," she said.

At the pad, you see friendly faces as a handful of workers linger, and you ride the elevator up the tower to 195 feet. There, suited up, you somehow find a way to use the bathroom with much of your suit, unzipped from the crotch and up the back, still in place.

"The tradition after this struggle was to write our initials in the accumulated frost of the 18-inch liquid oxygen supply line nearby," Whitson wrote. "It's odd the things that make an event real for you, but writing my initials in this frost was one of those moments. The frost was about five inches deep, and Valery (Korzun, station commander) thought we should have a snowball fight while we were waiting our turn to get in the toilet and orbiter."

Finally, members of the closeout crew help you squeeze into the cockpit and twist you into your horizontal seat. Then they close the hatch.

"Now it's just you and your crew," Melroy said. "You've got some things to do. There's sort of an ebb and flow, checklists. Your back starts to hurt because you've been lying on it a long time in this really uncomfortable suit."

The anticipation is mingled with a sense that time is zipping by.

"The part where you go from the launch all the way to orbit is really time-compressed," said Kalpana Chawla, who's flying on the Columbia science mission in January. "It's really hard to believe that you are sitting there on your back . . . for a couple of hours, waiting for the launch window to open up."

"My first launch," Wolf said, "I was thinking more about how it would be to float and handle your body in zero gravity and try to keep your work straight that you have, your tasks laid out."

A million things race through your mind, not least of which is your discomfort.

"It's painful," Atlantis Commander Jeff Ashby said. "You don't feel real good, but you have this sense that you're off on a really great adventure. And when the boosters light, there's, for me, a tremendous sense of all the people that I've ever come in contact with that have helped me along the way, that have shaped me, my parents, my colleagues, my friends, my teachers. I get this sense that I am a composite of all of them."

"And then the time finally comes, you're coming out of the last hold," Melroy said. "You close and lock your visor, and all you can hear is the sound of yourself breathing, and it's very, very quiet."

It's down to a few minutes. Then a few seconds. The delays, the training, the years of waiting are over.

"We could feel the engines gimballing in their final checks before launch some 100 feet or so below us at the aft end of the shuttle," Whitson wrote. "At launch minus 6.5 seconds, the main engines were ignited and the vibrations increased dramatically."

"And then you get a big rumble," Melroy said, "and you snap back instantly to what it's like in the sim (simulator). You remember, oh yeah, I'm supposed to be doing this, this and this, so you sort of dutifully punch the buttons and call things up. It's the habit pattern that kind of saves you.

"And you watch the engine throttle up, and they're coming up, and you say the word, I could hear myself saying it on the tape, as calm as could be, just like I was in the sim, 'Engines throttling,' and then suddenly the solid rocket boosters light, and that is like no airplane or anything else I've ever been in before. It was a really sharp jerk, almost like you were in a traffic accident or a train wreck. It kind of knocks the breath out of you," she said.

"It happens fast and hard," Wolf said, "much faster and much harder than I anticipated before my first launch. A lot of vibration. The stack moans and howls, it howls. . . . It is incredible, the sounds coming out of this thing. It is serious about getting into orbit."

"Some of the shuttle's clamor surprises you, worries you. Is it supposed to sound like this?"

"I was surprised at the noise that the forward thrusters make and the amount of firing they were doing," Ashby said. "It was boom, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom. It was almost constant random thrusting for the first minute or so, and I had not remembered that from any simulation. I saw the little sparkles like John Glenn saw, and was told later that it was ice coming off of our thrusters, little bits of ice, and they were being illuminated by the rising sun."

"And then it gets kind of weird," Melroy said, "because there's a lot of noise and vibration, but the sky is going past so fast. We saw a cloud deck. We burst through it like it was a tiny leaf fluttering by in the wind. It almost looks fake. You just can't believe that you're really going that fast."

The first stage of the flight extends from solid rocket booster ignition through separation. The second begins at separation and ends at main engine cutoff and external tank separation.

"Physically, it's a very rough roller coaster ride in first stage, followed by a feeling in second stage that you've been shot out of a cannon, a very smooth constant acceleration," Ashby said.

When the solid rocket boosters separate, Melroy said, "there's a blinding glare, and things kind of settle down, and there's just a light rumble."

On the trip, "most of what we see on orbit out the window is the blue sky eventually turning into black space because we're pointed straight up," Ashby said. "We can't see the ground. And intermittently we see strands of fire."

When you finally can see the Earth, the view is startling.

"It doesn't look like the pictures," Melroy said. "The pictures look, they just don't do it justice. There's a hundred more colors to everything out there. It's just so much more deeper and more intense than you thought it was going to be."

"The view is just so vast compared to what you see in a small plane," said Chawla, an avid pilot, "and so open and magnificent, and the fact that you can see the curvature just after seven-and-a-half minutes into the flight is really mind-boggling."

"I would liken the feeling to having someone turn on the lights after having lived in semidarkness for years," Whitson said of her first view of Earth from orbit. "I had never really seen anything quite so clearly or with so much color!"

"At 50 nautical miles," Melroy said, "my commander reached over and he grabbed my hand, because at 50 nautical miles, you officially become an astronaut. And he shook my hand, said congratulations, and the whole crew kind of chorused congratulations to me."

Amid the rush, forces have been building on your body, to more than three times Earth's gravity. It feels like someone is sitting on your chest. The engines are eased back to avoid putting too much stress on the shuttle.

"It suddenly becomes hard to talk, and you breathe in little pants," Melroy said. "I've had high-G forces in airplanes before, but typically they're of fairly short duration, five to ten seconds, and this goes on for a minute, and you're just panting, and you're thinking to yourself, 'Gee, could I shut off the engine if I absolutely had to manually, under this incredible force where it's hard to lift your arm?' You're thinking all those things, and then suddenly, the engines shut off, and there's another big jolt, and you're floating in your seat, and you can feel everything lifting around you, and the buckles of your harness start floating in front of your face, and it's suddenly all over."

"That is just an extreme sensation," Chawla said.

"I noticed that my checklist kept floating and I couldn't keep it under my leg, where I normally put it," Ashby said.

On Melroy's first trip, she was focused on her tasks and went immediately to her checklist when the shuttle reached orbit, while the veterans were simply thrilled to be back in space. This time, she thinks she'll enjoy the ride more.

For Wolf, experience translates into freedom to concentrate on the job ahead: installing the S1 truss on the space station.

"I'm focused on the spacewalks," Wolf said. "We've already signed on the dotted line, and we're going to go do a launch. So I'm going to go in there, and that's going to happen, but it's where my job starts is making these spacewalks work."

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