Description & Facts: Shuttle Endeavour middle-of-the-night launch. It lit up the entire sky. The video recording was taken from the Banana river (a lagoon called "river" between Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island) 6 miles away from the Shuttle platform in a restricted area inside the Kennedy Space Center. There is only one other closer viewing place 5 miles away from the platform at the Apollo/Saturn V Center where the Japanese invitees were. An even closer place is the VAB but that is highly restricted. The STS-123 was the 25th. flight to the International Space Station (ISS) and will be delivering a Japanese module and the Canadian Dextre robot to the ISS.