This morning, space shuttle Enterprise was flown from Washington, DC, her hometown of the last 27 years, to the Big Apple, where she will shortly be added to the collection of the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Musuem. Following the precedent set by Discovery during her final flight earlier this week, Enterprise and her 747 carrier aircraft circled low over the city a number of times for spectators on the ground, and the Internet is subsequently jammed with photos of her alongside various famous landmarks. However, I again have chosen to post something a little less obvious, a lovely shot of the shuttle and SCA over the New York skyline, with the Intrepid museum visible toward the bottom of the frame. (Look for the cruise ship tied up to the pier, then look right. You’ll see a white, dart-shaped airplane sitting on the next pier over — that’s one of the retired Concordes — then just right of that is the Intrepid. In case you don’t know, she’s a World War II aircraft carrier that’s now a museum ship with a collection of planes and other interesting vehicles displayed on her flight deck and the adjacent pier.)

The Enterprise/SCA pairing landed at JFK International, where the shuttle will be removed from the 747 (a process called “demating”) and stored in a hanger for the next several weeks. Sometime in June, she’ll be transported by barge down the Hudson River to Intrepid, where a crane will lift her into her new place of honor atop the old carrier. My understanding is that the Intrepid organization is trying to get the permits and funding together to construct a permanent building in which to house Enterprise, a science and technology center which will presumably be somewhere nearby the ship. In the meantime, though, the prototype shuttle will be covered by a kind of inflatable tent to protect her from the elements. I was happy to learn that; I have no idea what would happen to a space shuttle’s heat-shield tiles after sitting out in the weather for a year or two, but I can’t imagine it would be pretty.

Funny thing… Discovery‘s final flight depressed the hell out of me, because it really did seem like a funeral march with a 747 filling the role of a hearse. But seeing Enterprise up there in the sky atop a jumbo jet again, for the first time in decades… well, that was actually kind of a thrill. For her, the only shuttle that never flew in space, it was a sort of homecoming, one last day in the sun, one last chance to stretch her wings. I almost expected her to cast free of the jet and glide into JFK on her own, just as she did during the approach and landing tests she performed over Edwards Air Force Base back in the late ’70s. How cool would that have been? Impractical fancy, of course. Her systems were long ago frozen in place, I’m sure. But I enjoyed imagining it.

Incidentally, if you’d like to bring back memories of the exhilarating early days of the shuttle program — or see it for the first time, if you’re too young to have been there yourself — some kind soul has uploaded a complete recording of the live CBS coverage of Enterprise‘s first free flight and landing way back on August 12, 1977. Part 2 is probably the most interesting to casual viewers, as that’s the segment when she finally separates from the SCA, but I found Part 1 pretty entertaining as well, for the way Morton Dean, the on-air personality narrating the coverage, tries to explain exactly how this shuttle thing is supposed to work and generally kills time until the actual test begins. Watch for some truly primitive animation, and soak in the general enthusiasm and the sense that what we were about to see was an unprecedented harbinger of… the future! The earnest anticipation in Dean’s voice as the “pushover maneuver” approaches nearly breaks my heart. It’s so different from the blase attitude we eventually developed toward these machines, and from the thinly veiled contempt so many hold for them today. (Interestingly, Dean does end the segment by pointing out that, even in those heady days, the shuttle had its critics who didn’t believe it would be worth the cost, or that the “hundreds of flights” planned by NASA would be necessary or useful. I was only seven or eight when these ALTs took place, too unsophisticated and too excited myself about a new spaceship — named after the Star Trek ship, no less! — to be aware of these detractors, so I was somewhat shocked to hear their concerns voiced so early in the program.)

Oh, and as a bonus, the recording even includes vintage TV commercials: Mariette Hartley and James Garner shilling for Polaroid cameras, Florence Henderson pushing Tang (what else in the middle of a story about astronauts?), and of course the good-natured cornpone that was used to sell Countrytime Lemonade. I remembered all of these ads within the first five seconds of them. Ah, the ’70s… such different times. So much better in many respects…