Here’s another look at what’s happening with Discovery‘s replica engine nozzles. (I guess it’s not really correct to keep calling them replicas, considering they’re authentic spaceflown hardware, but NASA’s own Kennedy Space Center Twitter feed  — from whence I snagged this photo, incidentally — refers to them as replica shuttle main engines, or RSMEs, so there you go, straight from the astronaut’s mouth. Or something.)

Anyhow, I thought I’d share this shot because (a) it shows all three nozzles now back in place, and (b) it’s a little easier to discern what you’re looking at than in the one I posted yesterday. And also because I just like posting pics of space shuttles. Deal. Soon they’ll be in their respective museums and you won’t have to see any more of this stuff for a while, at least not until I get out to them and take my own photos…

This is going to sound kind of silly, but something that’s really been troubling me about the three surviving spaceflown shuttles being taxidermied for museum display is the thought of their mighty main engines ripped out and replaced by wood or fiberglass replicas. It’s not rational, I know. The shuttles are just big butterflies pinned to a board at this point, dead things that will never soar again, so what does it matter if their guts are missing? I don’t have a good answer for that question, to be honest. It just feels wrong to me. When I go see them in future years — and I do intend to make pilgrimages to each of them once they’ve arrived in their new, earthbound homes — I want to know that what I’m seeing is whole, that these are the actual machines that stoked the dreams of a generation of nerds like myself. Not mock-ups, not empty shells… that they could, in theory at least, be revived someday and sent up again. It’s a matter of authenticity, I guess. It’s the difference between seeing the well-intentioned King Tut’s tomb exhibit that used to be at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, and visiting the real thing in Egypt. The Vegas version looked pretty realistic, and certainly gave you a better idea of what the discovery of the tomb must’ve been like than a description in a book, but when you came right down to it, the walls were just painted stucco over sheet-rock, and somehow you could sense that. I think phony fiberglass engines stuck on the back of the orbiters would evoke a similar feeling… that somehow you were being cheated.

It turns out, however, I’ve been wrong in my assumption that these replicas would be complete fakes. According to the article from which I grabbed the fascinating image above, what’s going back into the engine sockets on Discovery, and eventually Endeavour and Atlantis as well, are real rocket nozzles that flew in space as part of earlier-generation engine packages. They’re not complete engines — compare what you can see in that image above to the one I posted a while back, and you’ll immediately notice that the big knob of plumbing that normally sits above the nozzle is missing — but at least they’re authentic space hardware. They’ve been up there. They’ve earned the right to be attached to my beloved orbiters.

I highly recommend you follow that link. There’s a whole mess of photos over there showing this nozzle and its re-installation into Discovery. The glimpses of men crawling around inside her aft end make me happy. They remind me of backyard mechanics like my dad wriggling underneath a lovingly restored hot rod…

I love the notion of bookends, of events coming full-circle… of symmetry, I suppose. We’ve been taught to expect it by stories and movies and songs: lovers separated by decades miraculously find one another again, the boy avenges his father and assumes the throne, the traveler returns home after his adventures abroad and restores order… you get the idea. I think the concept has power exactly because it so rarely happens in real life, where time is inexorably linear, the center usually does not hold, and the road generally does not bring you back around to the place you started from. But every once in a while…

Consider this photo that grabbed my attention earlier today:

The two geezers — er, distinguished older gentlemen — standing in the foreground are Bob Crippen and John Young, the legendary space shuttle (and, in Young’s case, Apollo) astronauts who flew the very first mission, STS-1, way back in 1981. Standing behind them, meanwhile, are the crew of STS-135, the final shuttle mission that ended in July of this year. The beginning and the end of the space shuttle program right there, folks. Symmetry.

If you’re interested in specifics, these people are, from left to right: Doug Hurley (STS-135 pilot); Robert Crippen (STS-1 pilot); John Young (STS-1 commander); Chris Ferguson (STS-135 commander); Sandy Magnus (STS-135 mission specialist); and Rex Walheim (STS-135 mission specialist). I found the photo here, among a whole bunch of different poses; I thought this was the most striking.

Incidentally, that’s not an actual space shuttle they’re standing in front of; it’s a mock-up used for training at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas… you know, the place that didn’t get to host a real shuttle orbiter despite having been a major part of the manned spaceflight program (“Houston, we have a problem…”) going back decades. I didn’t think too much about that when the shuttle disbursements were first announced, but the more time goes by, the more it bothers me. The Intrepid Museum in New York, as cool as it is, doesn’t really deserve a shuttle. Better they go to places that have an actual connection to the program. (Los Angeles qualifies because the orbiter airframes were built there by Rockwell International.)

Speaking of the museum-bound shuttle orbiters, recent photos of them have been somewhat shocking as big pieces of them are currently missing: the main engines, obviously, but also the orbital maneuvering system (OMS) thruster pods that flank the vertical stabilizer, and the forward reaction control system (FRCS). The FRCS is the set of thrusters visible just below the orbiter’s cockpit windows; removing that system has left a big rectangular cavity in the nose that is even more disconcerting (to me) than the missing engines on the back. But now I see that Discovery, at least, has its FRCS back in place after it was thoroughly cleaned and decontaminated in White Sands, New Mexico.

In other recent news you may or may not have heard about, Boeing has signed a lease with NASA for use of one of Kennedy Space Center’s former Orbiter Processing Facilities. Boeing intends to use the building to manufacture and maintain its CST-100 spacecraft, which are under development and will look something like larger versions of the old Apollo capsules, with seating for seven astronauts instead of three. The CST-100 is intended, like pretty much every other manned spacecraft currently on the drawing boards, to ferry crew and supplies to and from the International Space Station, and also possibly to a privately owned station planned by Bigelow Aerospace. Boeing hopes to send up its first CST-100 by 2015.

Meanwhile, NASA has announced its intention to send up an unmanned test version of its Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle — another Apollo capsule on steroids — by 2014, as a first step toward sending astronauts beyond Earth orbit again.

But I think the first American spacecraft to get back up there with people aboard is most likely going to be the SpaceX Dragon capsule. There’s a Dragon at Kennedy as we speak, getting prepped for its second unmanned test flight, which is scheduled to launch on December 19. (If you’ll recall, SpaceX orbited a Dragon at this same time last year.) The goal for this next flight was to rendezvous with the International Space Station and then, on a third flight, actually dock with the ISS, but SpaceX is feeling cocky and has asked for permission to combine flights two and three. In other words, they want to go for a docking now. Dragon is currently intended as an automated cargo carrier, but SpaceX has designed the craft so it can reconfigured to carry passengers, and the company is eager to get the vehicle crew-rated. The company’s ambitious founder, Elon Musk, has even said recently he wants to send astronauts to Mars aboard one of his ships by 2020. We’ll see about that — I’ve been hearing my whole life that a manned Mars trip was only a few years off — but after all the melancholy and apparent loss of direction that accompanied the end of the shuttle, it’s good to hear somebody talking seriously about a human presence up there in the black…

The objects in the photo above are Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs), the reusable, steerable rocket motors that were formerly fitted in threes to the back end of each shuttle orbiter (the spaceworthy ones, at least; poor old Enterprise never had the honor of sporting real engines). They’ve now all been removed from the surviving space-flown orbiters — the shuttles will be fitted with dummy engines when they go on museum display next year — and in this image, we see them gathered together in the Kennedy Space Center Engine Shop, all 15 of them, for the first and probably last time.

I’ve read that these engines are some of the most complicated, most powerful machines ever designed; three of them working together at launch developed some 37 million horsepower, the equivalent energy output of 13 Hoover Dams. Simply amazing.

I don’t much like the thought of them being permanently separated from their shuttles. I don’t like the thought of a Duesenberg sitting in a museum with nothing under its hood, either; it’s far more appealing, for me, to think of museum pieces as complete. Blame my sentimental, romantic nature. But I understand NASA’s current plan is to repurpose them for some future heavy-lift vehicle, so I suppose that’s a better fate for them than being taxidermied anyhow.

I don’t know how much longer they’ll be at Kennedy; they’re ultimately headed for a storage facility in Mississippi to await whatever the future holds…

Photo courtesy of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Facebook page.

Yeah, I know, space shuttles again. Sue me. I thought this photo was worth revisiting the subject, though:

Remember if you will that the last thing shuttle Atlantis did before returning to Earth was to deploy a tiny satellite called PicoSat. The photo above was taken by PicoSat as it coasted off into its new orbit. According to Christopher Ferguson, the commander of STS-135 who tweets under the handle Astro_Ferg, this was the last picture ever taken of a shuttle in space. (I guess that awesome shot of Atlantis‘ plasma trail as she re-entered the atmosphere doesn’t count because she technically wasn’t in space any more?) Anyhow, I just ran across this during some late-night surfing and thought it was worth sharing…

Photo source here.

To the good ships Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. May history record that they were stepping stones on the way to something wonderful, and not the dead end many would have you believe. Here’s to their two brave crews who didn’t make it home. And here’s also to the dreams of a generation born just slightly too late to have witnessed the glories of Apollo; the shuttles were our spaceships. The fact that they never quite lived up to the promises we were made is disappointing, yes. But they were magnificent machines nevertheless, and they should be remembered as such…

When I flipped on my TV at 3:45 this morning to see if anyone was covering the landing, all I could find was a mess of infomercials, a rerun of the previous night’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and some talking head blathering on about the debt ceiling. That speaks volumes about this whole situation, doesn’t it? Thirty years ago, all three major broadcast networks (this was before Fox, of course) devoted hours to the comings and goings of the space shuttles. Today people have other things on their minds, like Magic Bullet blenders and which political party is more effectively holding the nation’s economy hostage with their maneuverings. Fortunately, though, I had the Internet to turn to, and the NASA TV website. I got the live video feed up and streaming just in time to hear the double sonic boom as Atlantis homed in on Kennedy Space Center.

I’ll be honest, I was feeling pretty anxious as I sat there alone in my home office in the wee, dark hours, surrounded by an empty house and a silent world. I had this irrational fear that in spite of all the checks and inspections, something was going to happen to Atlantis as she re-entered, or as she touched down, and the whole damn shuttle program would end on a note of tragedy and ignominy. But no… it was a perfect landing, as smooth as a high mountain lake on a windless day. The only way it could’ve been better was if the sun had been up. There’s not much to see during night landings until the shuttle crosses the threshold of the runway and gets illuminated by the floodlights. Oh, NASA tries to make things interesting with night-vision cameras and a feed from the pilot’s heads-up display — and I’ll admit it is kind of neat to see the runway lights rising up out of the darkness through the cockpit window — but for this last, final, ultimate landing, it would’ve been really wonderful for Atlantis to be gleaming a triumphant white in a blue sky as she coasted past lush green swamps and waterways flashing like mirrors. C’est la vie, I suppose.

The last space shuttle came to a complete stop at 5:57:54 a.m. EDT, or 3:57 here in Salt Lake City. I continued to watch until 4:20, even though nothing was visibly happening. (I remember being so impatient as a kid watching the coverage of the early missions, because I expected the astronauts to just fling open the shuttle’s door and hop out immediately after landing, the way my various fictional space heroes did. I had no idea what was taking them so long!) As odd as this may sound, I was simply enjoying the sight of the orbiter resting on the runway, her details gradually filling in as the sky brightened behind her. There were lights in the cockpit windows, shining out with a warm amber glow, and the scene reminded me — rather incongruously — of those idealized paintings of woodsy cabins after a long, successful day of fishing. I found myself imagining the mission commander walking around beneath her, inspecting and admiring his ship while enjoying the cool, moist air on his skin and the warmth and smell from the coffee cup in his hand. Or perhaps I was imagining myself doing those things. For a moment there, I really wasn’t sure.

I couldn’t stay up until the astronauts disembarked, as much as I wanted to. The sun may have been rising over Florida, but it was still practically the middle of the night in SLC, and I had a long day of work to look forward to, and a concert tonight that will keep me up late again, and I don’t sleep as much as I ought to anyhow. So with a half-smile that was a mixture of sadness and satisfaction, I said my goodbyes to the space shuttle Atlantis, clicked off my computer, and went back to bed for a couple hours. And as I was drifting off, the DJ in my head served up a fragment of an old song, Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind,” a line about deadlines and commitments, and a mood of being resigned to an unadventurous adulthood even while your spirit is still yearning for something else…

Do you suppose the real reason why NASA granted Atlantis an extra day in space was so the shuttle program wouldn’t end on the 42nd anniversary of the first moon landing? Hmmmm.