In a scene reminiscent of those fondly remembered early mornings before school some 30 years ago, I stayed up much too late last night watching space shuttle Endeavour‘s return to Earth live on the NASA TV website. There’s not much to see during a night landing, sadly. The shuttle doesn’t have navigation lights like an airplane — I don’t know why, exactly, but I’d guess it’s because the lights would have to go right where the shuttle needs maximum heat-shield protection, i.e., the leading edges of the wings and the belly — so she’s all but invisible until she’s right over the runway. But NASA TV did its best. For nearly an hour, it was showing us the same digital map the guys in Mission Control see, tracking the orbiter’s wild streak across the globe as she decelerated from 18,000 miles per hour to about 200, her speed when the wheels hit the tarmac. (Ironically, considering how testy I get when people question the safety of these craft, I felt rather irrationally anxious during the so-called “period of maximum heating,” thinking how awful it would be to have another Columbia-style re-entry accident now, so close to the program’s conclusion.)
As Endeavour approached Kennedy Space Center, the view switched to Commander Mark Kelly’s cockpit heads-up display, so we could see the runway lights coming up out of the black landscape. Then it was on to a ground-based night-vision camera, which revealed a ghostly green silhouette of the orbiter, her nose and wing edges glowing a brilliant white, presumably because of residual heat from re-entry. Then finally the show ended with only a few seconds of the view you see above, a real-color camera feed of Endeavour’s final landing. Smooth and beautiful as always. It’s something of a wonder we’ve never seen a bad landing from one of these birds, really.
I did experience a moment of alarm after Endeavour came to a stop. While Commander Kelly talked over the radio with the ground crews, running down his checklists, I noticed an unfamiliar flickering on top of the shuttle. It seemed to be coming from near the base of the vertical stabilizer, right between the two bulging OMS engine pods. I’d never noticed anything like that before, and I briefly wondered if perhaps engineers had figured out a way to put a light on the ship after all, or if perhaps it was a reflection from some light source on the runway. But no, it was too sporadic to be a strobe light or an old-style rotating beacon. Then suddenly I realized it was a flame. My god, a jet of flame! As I said, I’d never seen that before, and a cold trickle of fear slithered through my guts… Endeavour had made a textbook landing, but she now was on fire! I waited and hoped someone on the audio channel would address this mysterious flame, but no one said a word. Feeling a bit frantic, I tabbed over to Twitter and started combing NASA’s official tweets, looking for some comment… surely someone else had noticed this… and then I breathed a sigh of relief. There it was: “The flames you saw at the top of Endeavour were normal – the vents from the auxiliary power units.” No big deal, then. Still… how odd that after 30 years and who knows how many landings I’ve watched on TV, that I’d never before seen that “normal” venting. For a moment, the spaceship of my dreams seemed more like a woman than ever, with endless layers and secrets yet to be revealed. God, I’m going to miss these things.
As I think I mentioned in an earlier entry, STS-134 was Endeavour‘s 25th mission. She is the youngest of the shuttle fleet, built quite literally out of spare parts as a replacement for the lost Challenger, after the bean counters decided that would be more economical and efficient than refitting the old Enterprise prototype for spaceflight. Her final mission lasted just under 16 days, which brings the ship’s final total to 299 days in space, and 4,671 orbits. Her final odometer reading is 122,883,151 miles. And now she’s finished. She’s already been towed into Kennedy’s Orbiter Processing Facility, where her fuel tanks will be drained and her engines and thrusters removed, to be replaced with inert mock-ups. Once the taxidermists are finished with her, she’ll be off to the California Science Center and displayed like any other mounted rhino head. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Meanwhile, the rising Florida sun this morning was glinting off Endeavour‘s sister ship Atlantis, finally in place on Launch Pad 39A after its tedious seven-hour roll-out during the night. STS-135, the last mission of the shuttle program, is scheduled to go on July 8.
If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like when an era comes to a close, this is it, kids…
This was the way the shuttle orbiters first entered the public consciousness during the Enterprise‘s ATL flights, before we civilians ever got a look at the now-familiar “stack” of solid-rocket boosters and external fuel tank, and it’s how the orbiters get home if they have to land somewhere other than at Kennedy. Basically, we’re looking at a tow-truck operation. It’s a tow of staggering statistics, a roughly 90-ton spacecraft physically anchored to the top of a 159-ton airliner, but a tow, nevertheless. If you don’t know your airplanes, the “tow truck” is a Boeing 747, still one of the largest airliners in the world even after 40 years of operation. NASA has two of them (technically referred to as the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, or SCA) that have been specially fitted out for shuttle-hauling duty. Interestingly, the first was purchased from American Airlines and was still sporting the AA livery — red, white and blue stripes running horizontally down the length of the fuselage — during the early days with Enterprise. And here’s another fun bit of trivia: on both planes, the mechanism the orbiter mounts to sports hand-painted instructions to “Attach Orbiter Here… Black Side Down.”
See that little red dot down there on the platform with the smaller white dot on top? That’s a person wearing (presumably) a red jacket and a hardhat. Just to give you some sense of the scale we’re dealing with here. 
Photo credit: Pat Benic/UPI/Newscom
