Just to update all the Loyal Readers (I follow this stuff so you don’t have to!), Endeavour arrived at the International Space Station early this morning. The ISS is starting to resemble a busy airport with all the arrivals and departures: on Monday, three members of its crew will undock one of the Soyuz capsules currently moored to the station and return to Earth; their replacements will be coming up in another Soyuz on June 9. In the meantime, Endeavour will remain at the station until June 1. You know, this is the way it ought to be, an orbiting waystation on the frontier between Earth and the universe beyond, with regular “commuter” flights coming and going every week — maybe even every day! — while other, more ungainly vessels designed for pure spaceflight wait nearby to take passengers to all the outward destinations. I know, I saw 2001 too many times as a kid, but this is the vision we were once promised, a vision that seemed so reasonable, so inevitable. I can’t help but get a little misty when I see echoes of it here in the real world.
Anyway, the shuttle’s cargo of spare parts — conveniently packaged on a kind of “pallet” called the Express Logistics Carrier 3 (ELC-3) — has already been offloaded by the orbiter’s robotic manipulator arm and attached to the station. Upcoming spacewalks will focus on dispersing and installing the equipment around the station. The task for tomorrow, though, will be setting up the AMS experiment package I mentioned the other day.
Meanwhile, back here on Earth:
That’s some of the crew of STS-135, the very last shuttle mission, posing in front of their ride, the shuttle Atlantis, as it was moved yesterday to the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, where it will be mated to an external fuel tank and a pair of solid rocket boosters for the final time. As of now, it’s inside the VAB, hanging vertically in one of the “high bays,” as you can see here. An amazing sight, a vehicle roughly the size of an Airbus 320-200 airliner dangling from an impossibly high ceiling like a Christmas-tree ornament. I wish I could see it in person. But you know I’ve been thinking the past few days just what an amazing age we live in, how much unprecedented access we space buffs have to all of this stuff now. YouTube, Twitter, NASA’s official websites, live video streaming, and the ubiquity of digital cameras have opened up the space program in ways that couldn’t even be dreamed of back in Buzz and Neil’s heyday. Or even just a decade ago, for that matter. How sad, then, that there will be nothing for us to see come fall…
I don’t know. I’m trying to be optimistic about the future. SpaceX and some of the other private companies are making amazing strides toward manned spaceflight, and NASA is also promising that it’s not finished sending humans into the black. (Case in point: a recent interview with NASA administrator Charles Bolden in which he swears up and down that America is headed for deep space, that it will happen and we’ll be on the forefront just as we always have.) But it really does feel like an age is ending, doesn’t it? Hell, one of the men who authored the legislation that created NASA just died this week, and my first thought was “how appropriate that he should leave just as the dream he helped start is dying as well.” All the talk about regrouping and setting new goals and getting our butts back out there sounds a lot like someone who’s lost confidence and is trying to convince themselves that the game really isn’t over. I hope I’m wrong about that. But as I’ve said so many times before, the 21st century ain’t all it was meant to be.
For now, though, I can at least revel in the last warm embers of the fading fire. Videos below the fold, for those who are interested…
First up is a really beautiful clip shot by one of the Endeavour astronauts not long after they reached orbit. Nothing really happens — it’s just five minutes of the external tank dropping back toward Earth after being jettisoned — but the clarity of the footage is nothing short of astounding. Every little detail on the tank, including the scorch marks where the shuttle blasted free of it, is striking. And it is kind of cool to see how it eventually starts to tumble, presumably as it starts to enter the denser atmosphere…
As I noted above, this is the sort of thing that was unavailable to the general public not so very long ago, and now it’s almost mundane. Which is both good and bad, I suppose, because the last thing the space program needs is the stink of the commonplace. But you can’t have it both ways.
And now one more, if you’re not too tired of this stuff (I never am, but I, of course, am a bit warped). This is video shot from inside the ISS as Endeavour performs its Rendezvous Pitch Manuever, a.k.a. the “backflip,” so ground controllers can get a good look at the ship’s belly and wings, allowing them to check for damage to the heat-shield tiles. This is a fairly new safety protocol instituted after the loss of Columbia; if there were a problem that would prevent the orbiter from coming home safely, astronauts could attempt to repair it on orbit. If the damage proved irreparable, the crew would “winter over” at the ISS until another shuttle or a couple of Soyuz capsules could be readied and sent up to rescue them. Grim purpose aside, though, the backflip makes for a glamorous view of the complete spacecraft, rather like Admiral Kirk’s inspection tour of the starship Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Incidentally, that video is sped up. The actual RPM takes about nine minutes.
