This was the spectacular scene at Launch Pad 39A earlier this evening:
According to various Twitter feeds and such, Endeavour was unharmed by the lightning storm; I guess Mother Nature was just giving her a big sendoff for her final voyage. Now the Rotating Service Structure, the big clamshell gantry that encloses the shuttles while they sit on the pad, has been retracted and, as of this writing, everything is on track for a scheduled liftoff tomorrow afternoon at 3:47 EST.
With space shuttle Endeavour, the youngest of the fleet, scheduled to blast off on its final mission Friday afternoon, this seems an appropriate time to post the following, a NASA-produced video overview of the shuttle program narrated by none other than Captain James T. Kirk himself. Blow this one up to full-screen size… there’re some great clips here, including a time lapse of the crawler carrying Endeavour out to the launch pad, archival footage of the lifting bodies that were tested early in the shuttle’s design phase (think of the opening from The Six Million Dollar Man), and film of the mid-70s glide and landing tests using the prototype shuttle Enterprise.
It looks to me like this might be part of a longer documentary, considering it only touches the surface of the shuttle program, completely ignoring the Challenger and Columbia disasters and equally failing to mention the many, many achievements such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the ISS, and the Buck Rogers-style untethered spacewalks using the Manned Maneuvering Unit. If this does turn out to be a preview of a full-length doc, put me down for a DVD copy…
Incidentally, I found it interesting that Enterprise was originally supposed to be called the Constitution, considering that Star Trek‘s fictional Enterprise is — are you ready for this? — a Constitution-class starship. And yes, I know exactly what a tremendous nerd I am, thank you for mentioning it…
This afternoon, NASA chief Charles Bolden announced where the four surviving space shuttles will be going once the program ends later this year. It’s a question space buffs like myself have been speculating about for months as museums across the country vied to be one of the lucky recipients. The results are somewhat predictable, but also arguably the best possible choices.
If you haven’t already heard, the Smithsonian will trade Discovery for Enterprise, the original orbiter that never flew in space (it was used only for glide tests in the 1970s) and which has been on display at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia for several years; Enterprise will in turn go to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City. The Endeavour is headed for the California Science Center in Los Angeles, and finally, Atlantis, currently scheduled as the last shuttle to fly, will remain at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Like I said, I think this arrangement is probably the best that could be expected. I seem to recall some talk of the Smithsonian wanting two shuttles, so it could display the Enterprise alongside one that had flown in space in a “beginning and ending” sort of display. While I think that would be neat, it’s also not very fair considering how few shuttles there are to go around. And given that the Smithsonian is the keeper of our nation’s most historically significant items, it makes more sense for it to have Discovery, the workhorse of the shuttle fleet, over Enterprise, a prototype that never left Earth’s atmosphere. It also makes sense that one of the shuttles remain at Kennedy, the home port of the fleet. (My hope is that NASA builds something similar to the astounding and dramatic Apollo/Saturn V Center to house Atlantis.)
I’m somewhat more ambivalent about the Enterprise going to the Intrepid Museum. I’ve been to the Intrepid and it’s an outstanding facility, but this means that three of the orbiters will be on the east coast. There are many fine air museums around, and it seems to me like there ought to have been one somewhere in the middle of the country that could’ve
housed a shuttle, so everyone in the nation could have relatively easy access to one. In other words, they should’ve been distributed so there’s one one each coast and one in the middle, with the fourth remaining at Kennedy. But looking at the situation selfishly, at least there’s going to be one near me in LA. I’m already thinking about a pilgrimage to see Endeavour
once it’s installed at the California Science Center.
One final note: I’m sure it was planned this way, but the announcement happens to come on the 30th anniversary of the very first shuttle launch, the mission designated STS-01. On April 12, 1981, Columbia took off with only two men aboard: Commander John W. Young, a veteran of the Apollo missions who was the ninth man to walk on the moon, and pilot Robert Crippen, on his very first spaceflight. I can still recall my dad waking me up at the crack of dawn to watch the countdown and launch live, my frustration at all the delays and building anxiety because it was getting near time for me to leave for school, and how much I loved my dad for saying I could be late for school because some things are more important. Here’s an edited clip of that history-making moment:
I loved seeing the white external fuel tank again — they used to paint them, you know, before someone realized they could save a few million pounds of take-off weight if they left the tank its natural orange color; yes, I said a few million pounds — and it amuses me to hear the cheering when the solid-rocket boosters successfully separate. All of this routine stuff was still very uncertain back then…
And just like this, space shuttle Discovery became a museum piece moments before noon EST today:
But this also is something I’ve said before. For today, let’s just focus on Discovery and her incredible legacy. She is the most-traveled of the shuttle fleet, clocking up a whopping 365 days in space over 39 missions across a 27-year operational lifespan. She’s circled the Earth 5,830 times for a grand total of 148, 221, 675 miles traversed while in orbit. And as Commander Steve Lindsay noted in his remarks on the Kennedy Space Center runway this afternoon, with his ship standing proudly on the tarmac behind him, she came home today as perfect as on her very first flight.
Discovery‘s next journey will be a comparative hop of only 750 miles, from Kennedy to Washington, DC, where she will become a permanent resident of the Smithsonian alongside her sister ship, the prototype Enterprise. My understanding is that the two spaceplanes will be parked nose to nose, representing the beginning and the end of the program. One day, I intend to stand in front of that exhibit. And I’m willing to bet my eyes will fill with tears for what was, and what I always thought would be…
Well, that was a fast mission… STS-133 is already winding down, just as I was getting used to the idea. Discovery undocked from the International Space Station early this morning and is now pulling away a little more with each orbit, heading for a planned Wednesday landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It leaves behind a completed ISS, the largest object mankind has ever put up there in the black. It’s not exactly the elegant wheel-shaped space station of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, but it is nonetheless an incredible achievement. I suspect — I hope — that 75 years from now, the building of orbiting structures will have advanced enough and become common enough that people will marvel at the story of the ISS, amazed that we could have accomplished something so monumental using such primitive technology, just as we now look back and admire the men of the 1930s who constructed Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge with little more than sweat and sheer determination. Of course, that’s assuming that the ISS isn’t the last big thing we do up there before we run out of everything and descend into a new feudalism. But I’m trying to be positive.
Getting back to Discovery, I don’t know if it’s because this is her final mission, or if I’m just paying more attention because it’s her final mission, but there is really an amazing plethora of videos — or should that be a plethora of amazing videos? — from STS-133 floating around the InterWebs. I think I mentioned the other day how really, shockingly different it is today than it was even just a few years ago, when amateur movie-makers had no efficient way to share their work and NASA only released a few minutes of their footage, which the news media promptly cut down to about 15 seconds because we had to get back to the day’s sports scores or some damn thing. As much as I gripe about the 21st century, I have to admit that YouTube is a boon for geeks like me. And tonight I’m taking advantage of that boon to gather here on Simple Tricks a few of my favorite video clips from the past two weeks… enjoy!
With her solid rocket boosters burning a brilliant orange against a steel-blue late-afternoon sky, the space shuttle Discovery lifted off today on her final voyage before retirement. Discovery is the workhorse of the shuttle fleet with 38 prior missions to her credit, including the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, the final docking mission with the old Russian station Mir, and a return to space for Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. Discovery was also the first shuttle to fly again after both the Challenger and Columbia disasters. I think it’s fair to say that the good ship Discovery is something special among the shuttle fleet.
The current mission, designated STS-133 in NASA-speak, is yet another trip to the International Space Station where Discovery will deliver the inelegantly named Permanent Multipurpose Module and various supplies and spare parts. Also along for the ride is a humanoid robot called Robonaut 2, or R2 for short, which is intended to help engineers study how such robots function in space. Hopefully, R2 will someday assist the station’s crew with repair work and scientific experiments. (R2 is actually pretty interesting; it has highly dexterous human-shaped hands and looks like something out of one of our favorite sci-fi movies. No, not Star Wars… actually this thing reminds me more of the sentry robots from The Black Hole, minus the double-barreled laser guns and the permanent bad attitudes.)
One interesting trivia note for this flight: one of the mission specialists, astronaut Steve Bowen, flew on Atlantis last May during the STS-132 mission, making him the first astronaut ever to fly back-to-back missions. (This wasn’t exactly planned; it came about because he had to replace a guy who was injured in a bicycle accident.)
If anyone’s interested, the official NASA video of this picture-perfect launch, from main-engine start to external fuel-tank separation, is below the fold:
Barring any mechanical problems that require her to go back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, space shuttle Discovery has made her final journey to Launch Pad 39A. She’s scheduled to launch three weeks from today, February 24, bound for the International Space Station on her last flight before retirement. Here’s a lovely photo taken during her nighttime roll-out earlier this week:
(Click the thumbnail to go to the big version. It’s worth it.)
Big news from the Final Frontier: SpaceX, the spaceflight company started by Paypal and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk, has become the first to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft that was designed, built, and operated entirely by a commercial entity, rather than a government agency. You can read the details here, but in brief, SpaceX’s capsule-style Dragon spacecraft was launched yesterday morning aboard one of the company’s own Falcon 9 boosters (which you may recall were successfully tested earlier this year); the Dragon circled the earth twice at an altitude of 186 miles, then returned beneath three big parachutes for a soft splashdown in the Pacific, just like the old Apollo moon ships. The flight was flawless, and the Dragon even came down within a mile of the waiting recovery ship.
With the future of NASA’s Ares booster and Orion space capsule uncertain and the final flights of the Space Shuttle Program fast approaching, the Falcon/Dragon system now looks to be our nation’s best bet at maintaining our spaceflight independence, rather than having to bum rides off the Russians. The next step will be bringing the Dragon to within sight of the International Space Station, followed by a third test flight in which it will actually dock with the ISS. SpaceX, feeling its oats a bit, has proposed combining those two flights and just going straight to the station, but hasn’t yet received permission to do that. And then, assuming all these tests go as well as yesterday’s, SpaceX will win a $1.6 billion contract for 12 flights to the ISS. The Dragon will be carrying only supplies on these missions, no humans — passengers are going Russian once the Shuttle retires — but the craft was designed to be configurable for passengers, so maybe once it’s proved itself… well, we’ll see.
I’d like to believe that Americans will remain at the forefront of manned spaceflight, or at least involved in it, but there doesn’t seem to be much public interest in it anymore, and with the politicians now obsessing over the national debt (while stubbornly turning a blind eye to the single largest item in the budget, our insanely huge military budget), I can’t help but feel pessimistic. Maybe outsourcing the logistics of spaceflight to private companies will help. Maybe it won’t. As I said, we’ll see.
As long as I’m blathering about space stuff, and on a somewhat happier note to wrap up the entry, NPR blogger Robert Krulwich was pondering the subject of scale the other day, and he used for example the fact that the Apollo astronauts really explored very, very little of the moon’s surface, in spite of the perceived significance of their missions. He used some interesting maps to illustrate his point, showing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s tracks superimposed over a football field and a baseball diamond. Interesting stuff… but things got really interesting when he received a message from none other than Armstrong himself, explaining why he and Buzz didn’t venture very far from the Eagle… and suggesting he, Armstrong, would’ve liked to go much farther. Armstrong, if you don’t know, is the most reclusive of all the Apollo astronauts. He rarely makes public appearances, and unlike so many of his colleagues, he hasn’t written a book about his experiences, so having him send an email response to a blog entry is a pretty big deal. Go check it out!
Feast your eyes on this awesome photo from Astronomy Picture of the Day, preferably while listening to the theme song from Cosmos:
That’s astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson relaxing in the International Space Station’s cupola, the big observation port that was mounted to the ISS earlier this year. This image is so similar to the cover art of many of the sci-fi novels I read as a kid that I’m frankly a little weirded out by it. I’m experiencing deja vu for a sight that only became possible a few months ago. A strange feeling… but a lovely sight indeed.
Click the image to see it larger, or go here to see it really large…
If you’re fortunate enough to live in an area where the glow of urban lighting hasn’t completely washed out the nighttime sky, you may have spotted the International Space Station zooming overhead. I’ve seen it several times myself, a golden spark flashing across the Salt Lake Valley at breakneck speed. On one memorable occasion, it had a companion spark, one of the space shuttles running alongside just after undocking to come home. (I don’t remember which shuttle it was… I really should make notes about that sort of thing). Anyhow, you may have wondered just exactly how big the station is to be visible to the naked eye like that. And if you’re like me, the usual description — that it’s the size of a football field, the largest object we’ve ever put into space — doesn’t really help much. (I can’t help it if I’m not sports-minded!)
Earlier this evening, my friend Jeff Farr posted the following chart on Facebook:
And now I have no trouble visualizing it at all. Why didn’t somebody just say it was nearly as wide as the Enterprise‘s saucer section… sheesh!
The origin page for this nifty graphic has some more information about the station, its systems, and how long it’s going to be up there, if you’re interested…
