Watching Falcon Heavy...from the anchor desk

T+3, as Ron Burgundy might see it
London, ON
February 2018
Photo originally posted to Instagram

I lead a somewhat surreal life. Not predictable. Not conventional.Not remotely normal. But all that weirdness sometimes leads to cool moments. Like today's.

Most Tuesdays, I participate in a live segment called Tech With Todd on CTV News Channel. The anchor, Todd van der Heyden, hosts it from Toronto, and I join in from the CTV London studio. Erin Bury and I spend a few minutes touching on some of the more notable tech stories of the week, and it's always great fun.

The segment usually runs at 2:40 p.m. Eastern, but given the realities of live, news-driven TV, can sometimes get bumped into later slots if breaking news comes along. As you can imagine, delays happen fairly regularly, and represent another neat aspect of life in media. Stuff changes, so you roll with it. No biggie.

The Falcon Heavy rocket was originally supposed to launch at 1:30, well before our scheduled 2:40 airtime. Then two things happened: A press conference bumped us to 3:40, and unpredictable upper-level winds in Florida kept pushing back the launch time. Eventually, it became apparent that SpaceX's schedule was about to align perfectly with ours.

And sure enough, the rocket lifted off while we were on the air. So when the big moment came, we shifted gears from what we had planned to talk about, and simply talked about the vehicle's significance as it rose into the sky.

It seemed surreal: Sitting at the anchor desk on live TV, providing play-by-play of the biggest milestone in U.S. space history since the Columbia first lifted off. I was a kid on that day, and I watched that first space shuttle leave the planet on that day, too. Then, as now, it felt like something had changed, like we'd ended one chapter and started in on the next.

Some days you just get lucky, and this day was one of them.

Your turn: Did you see the launch? Starman? Is this as cool as I think it is?