Many times I've seen the International Space Station in orbit as it passes overhead, and for me the experience will never lose its grandeur. Debate all you want about whether 'we' should have built the station or whether we should have set up a moon base or whether we should have explored the oceans first, it's still awesome to look up at the football-field-sized man-made object floating 350 kilometers overhead.
Tonight was particularly good, as I got to see the space shuttle racing away from the station at only about 30 arc minutes away (which amounts to only a 2 second timespan ahead of the station ). The shuttle is planning to return to earth tomorrow, but until it's ready to do its deorbit burn it remains in the "upside-down" configuration which means that the top of the shuttle and payload bay are facing the earth so momentarily it was second only to the moon in terms of brightness as visible to us. Very cool.
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