Mission Specialist Soichi Noguchi of Japan gives a thumbs up from the flight deck in the first video downlink from space shuttle Discovery.

Titusville, Fla. ? “Go, baby! Go, baby!” Casey Kauffman shouted as the shuttle Discovery lifted off its Cape Canaveral launch pad on time Tuesday and disappeared into a cloud.

Kauffman and tens of thousands of spectators stood along the highways, rivers and beaches of Brevard County and sweltered in near-90-degree breezeless heat to catch a glimpse of the spacecraft’s big booster rockets taking the shuttle program back into space for the first time since the 2003 Columbia disaster.

The crowd joined in the “five-four-three-two-one-zero” countdown with launch control, then erupted into cheers when the bright light and white exhaust plume rose from the launch pad 11 miles across the Indian River.

“I had goosebumps,” said Kauffman, an exporter who lives in Davie, Fla., and drove up just to witness the launch.

“It is the greatest thing I have ever seen,” added her husband, Phillip, a retired trucking terminal manager who had never seen a launch before. “I said a little prayer that they would make it.”

A Canadian firm manufactured the robotic arm that will let astronauts check the shuttle’s wing for any damage from ice or foam breaking off the external fuel tank during liftoff – the problem that doomed the Columbia mission.

The equipment is a contribution that many Canadians in the crowd, including Daniel Prince, were especially proud of.

Wearing his space suit modeled after the one the space shuttle astronauts wear, 6-year-old David Walters sits on the lap of his mother, Ali, as they watch the successful launch of the space shuttle Discovery at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland on Tuesday.

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Prince, who was vacationing in central Florida with his family. “The kids will remember it for the rest of their lives.”

From another part of the world, Hartmut Engler, 37, an Otis Elevator Co. manager in Berlin, also was impressed.

“It was great. Unbelievable. Fantastic to see it in real life,” he said. “It was like winning six hits in the lottery.”

The spectacle also impressed the younger people in the crowds.

“It was awesome, wonderful, cool,” said Samantha Dennigan, 9, of Louisberg, Kan.

Like many others, her family of four juggled a Florida vacation to include a trip to Titusville in hopes of seeing a launch.

Shanda Burrows, of Monteagle, Tenn., called the launch “a once-in-a-lifetime feeling of pride.”

“I cried. I crossed my fingers. I was going, ‘Aw please, go, go, go,'” the prekindergarten teacher said after the launch.

Said her husband, Barry: “It was better than a finish run at the Daytona 500.”