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Shuttle Discovery Docks With Space Station
Velcroman1 writes "The space shuttle Discovery has docked with the International Space Station for the final time at 2:15 p.m. EST, where it will make a last delivery to the orbiting space lab — before parking ultimately at a museum. With Discovery's presence, the ISS becomes a truly 'international' space station. This is the first time spacecraft from the United States, Russia, Europe and Japan have all docked simultaneously, NASA said. The station also hosts the Leonardo Multipurpose Module built by the Italian Space Agency and recently gained Dextre, the Canadian Space Agency's robotic handyman."
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html
yeah! we'll make you drive sub-compact sized space shuttles and swap your V8 rockets for 1.1litre ones! we'll make you leave your guns at home! You'll have to eat proper cheese for breakfast and noodles for lunch every day, and drink vodka instead of water! All the movies will be art-house in strange languages and you'll have to read the subtitles (but the upside is there will be naked good looking people in them, if less explosions and machine guns)! The controls will all be in Russian and Japanese and French, and the measurements will all be in metric! It'll be crazy, you'll love it!
If your threshold for amazement is violating the known laws of the universe, I fear you are destined to live a very, VERY boring life.
People seem to forget that in the last ~100 years we've gone from thinking nothing heavier than air could ever fly, to landing robots on other freaking planets.
The fact that a manned craft going to outer space elicits nothing more than a yawn from most people is both frightening and humbling.
C'est la vie.
The crew could take a Soyuz down.
It seems like the shuttle would make meaningful addition to the usable to the ISS with its arm, cargo bay and pressurized quarters. What a shame to deorbit all that useful stuff and mothball it in a museum.