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NASA’s Contest To Design the Last Shuttle Patch
rocamargo writes "The space shuttle program is on its way out, but the core of people who built and maintained it will live on. To honor them, NASA gave its employees the chance to design the patch that will commemorate the shuttle program, which is slated to end in September, after STS-133 flies. From the designs of 85 current and former employees, the Shuttle Program Office has selected 15 finalists. The prospective patches, presented here, will be voted on internally by NASA employees and judged by a small panel." I've been thinking a lot lately about the end of the Space Shuttle. For someone my age, the shuttle really *IS* space travel. I'm going to be really sad to see STS-133 land.
Eh, just replying here to a bunch of other sibling responses. Newer spy-sats can indeed do a lot of things the Blackbird could do, as well as some stuff that the Blackbird couldn't do. But to claim that they could completely replace the Blackbird is a bit much. Spy sats all follow known orbits. It is possible to compute those orbits and avoid/hide from spy sats. Both sides of the cold war did that a lot, which is part of the reason why the U2 and Blackbird were so useful. Does that mean that we NEED the Blackbird (taking its costs and other stuff into account)? Not necessarily. But I'm sure there have been cases since its retirement where government or military leaders sat back and went "if only we still had a Blackbird". Assuming they haven't been duping us the whole time, and they actually did replace it with something better.
And on that note, the U-2 is still in active use (they call it the TR-1 now). So one of the ironies there is that the U-2 outlasted its replacement.. by a lot. If anything, it shows that there's still use for long range human recon planes (compared to spy sats). Though I guess UAVs are gonna completely take over that role soon enough.