The dream. When I worked at the Space Center, the stress of being responsible -- even in a very small way -- for a shuttle launch seemed to give everyone the same recurring nightmare. The nightmare is that it's launch day, and something goes wrong during the fueling, or worse -- during the launch, and it's your fault. Everyone I worked with had this dream at some point. It's not a good dream.

I still have the dream, every few months or so, including last night. It's changed a bit over the years; the shuttle still goes haywire, but it's no longer my fault when it happens. It's still distressing. This time, I was really close to the launch; only a few hundred yards, and it was really cloudy. Through a hole in the clouds I could see sparks flying out of the shuttle where no sparks should have been, and thought "Oh, no...". I told everyone it was going to crash, and while I didn't see the impact, molten lumps of debris started raining down on us, and we had to dodge them. Then I woke up.

I can't imagine working on some of the probes they are launching now. Each requires more than a decade of work to plan and build, and it all comes down to a single launch. I think the Mars probes they've launched have had less than a 50% success rate in just getting there. I sure those guys have The Dream a lot too.