The title of this entry says it all:
This nifty timelapse photo of space shuttle Endeavour was taken on Saturday, May 28, while the orbiter was still moored to the International Space Station. The streaks of light in the bottom-right quarter of the frame are cities passing by below, and if you look closely, you can make out stars through the thin shell of Earth’s atmosphere in the background. If you want to see this pic really large, check out NASA’s gallery. (Gleefully borrowed from the Bad Astronomy Blog.)
To bring all you Loyal Readers up to date, Endeavour undocked from the station late Sunday night and is expected to return to Kennedy Space Center in Florida tonight — or early tomorrow morning, depending on how you define things — at 2:35 AM EDT.
Meanwhile, shuttle Atlantis will begin its achingly slow, one-mile-per-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39A — the final time a shuttle stack will ever make this six-and-a-half-hour trip — at 8 p.m. EDT tonight, which I believe is only about a half hour from the time I’m writing this. There’s a background article about the crawler vehicle that’s carrying the Atlantis stack, a pretty amazing machine in its own right, here, if you’re interested. NASA has two of these crawlers, both dating back to the Apollo program. I find myself wondering what the next vehicle they carry will be… assuming there will be one at all. The reality of the shuttle’s end is really starting to sink in for me now…
Click here for pictures of my trip to the Kennedy Space Center, and then scroll to the right for more pictures (scroll to the left if you want to see cheesy pictures of my family & I on a Disney Cruise).
At any rate, the pics include Launch Pads 39-A and 39-B, the Vehicle Assembly Building, the mobile launchpad that you described above, and (my personal favorite), the garage they use to store the shuttles, complete with a vertical slot in the door so that the tail can fit through without them having to build a much, much taller door.
Thanks for sharing those, Brian! Some neat stuff there… I visited Kennedy myself way back in 1997, but it was an overcast, rainy day and all of my photos were taken from the tour bus. Did you check out the Apollo/Saturn museum while you were there? Pretty amazing…