Space Shuttle Endeavor Lands In Los Angeles After Final Flight 111
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the an-era-ends dept.
from the an-era-ends dept.
Today the space shuttle Endeavor completed its final ferry flight, landing in Los Angeles, California after leaving Edwards Air Force Base earlier today. The shuttle will now undergo preparations for its journey through the streets of L.A. (at a cost of 400+ trees) to its final resting place at the California Science Center. It'll go on public display October 30. Endeavor spent over 296 days in space throughout 25 missions, comprising 4,671 orbits that added up to over 197 million kilometers of travel. Slashdot's own Kaushik Acharya was at the Griffith Observatory in L.A. for the flyover, and he provided some great pictures of Endeavor's passing.
Saw It (Score:5, Informative)
Nice low-level flight right over Berkeley.
My kid was in class, heard the sound of the low-level flight, and they all saw it right out of the classroom window.
Gee, the end of an era. We could have had so much more. It's good that we have SpaceX doing something sensible about space flight, and NASA funding enough of that, but I think we learned one sad lesson from the Space Program: You can't trust the American electorate and their political representatives to do what's important for the future of the species.
Saw the landing @LAX (Score:4, Informative)
I was @LAX, and saw the fly-overs and the landing there. Great crowd.
Re:Good video of the landing (Score:2, Informative)
This is the same link.. just wrapped with the HTML to make it clickable.
Space Shuttle Endeavour lands at LAX [youtube.com]
WRONG it wasn't ever in space (Score:0, Informative)
it was in low earth orbit NOT space
Re:How do you guarentee a safe shuttle flight? (Score:4, Informative)
But lets face it..the shuttle was a megaflop.
It was SUPPOSED to be a "space truck" that could take both the military (thus saving money) and civilian loads while having a fast enough turnaround time to make space travel truly economical but that's NOT what we ended up with. What we got was a ship that had too small a bed for military payloads, which meant we had to pay for Atlas for the military as well as the shuttle, and as we found the rigors of spaceflight meant that the inspections and work required to get it ready for another flight slowed things down too much to ever make it economical, finally they were supposed to be retired by 86 but because we never could settle on a replacement we kept sending up these aging birds until they finally started falling apart.
Frankly if we can't get the Apollo system back on line economically we ought to just fricking buy Soyuz. I'm sure the Russians would be happy to license their designs and sell us some rockets, we've been using their engines in our rockets for awhile now, why not just go all the way? It'll save us a ton of time and cash, the Russians will be happy for the checks, its a win/win as far as I can see and saves us having to hitch rides just to get anything done. The only other choice I see is man rating the Atlas or Delta rockets which who knows how much that'll cost.