A Bittersweet Finale For Discovery Space Shuttle

Julie188 writes "The shuttle Discovery re-entered the Earth's atmosphere for the last time Wednesday to close out the space plane's 39th and final voyage. And so marks the beginning of the end for America's shuttle program. Everything about the last flight felt epic, from how it overcame a down-to-the-last-second problem to launch on its final mission in February, to its sunny final landing this week. As it coasted to a stop, Discovery's odometer stood at some 5,750 orbits covering nearly 150 million miles, during 39 flights spanning a full year in space — a record unrivaled in the history of manned rockets."

Comments

Longer video

[amicusNYCL]

Only 2:30, but here is NASA's landing video from their Youtube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/NASAtelevision#p/a/724782A8B8BE3EE5/0/Drv0SS1rCpk

Definitely a nail biter

[dgatwood]

As someone who was there watching the launch in person, it was definitely a nail biter. Forty seconds left in the launch window, though I suppose they could have waited a day and gone up then.

It almost got delayed a day anyway. There's a minimum separation time between when one ship leaves ISS and another one docks, and if they had held fast to that schedule, it would have been delayed until Friday because of the late departure of... I think it was a Soyuz mission. They decided to override that and go on Thursday anyway. Either way, there presumably was an alternate launch window already planned for Friday.

The best part was how many people reacted to the original mission schedule in the same way. NASA's banners said that it would be up for 10 days and spend 363 days in orbit. Immediately, my reaction was, "Wait... you're within two days of being up there for a year, and you're not going to do it?" Well, they extended the mission by two days.

And just to anthropomorphize the shuttle a bit, I don't think general purpose computer 5 was ready to go to a museum. It failed to shut off. I particularly liked the controller's comment when he said that they'd be sure not to use that switch on the next flight. Hilarious.

Wow. Just... wow.

Alas

[SnarfQuest]

I have been feeling that the shuttle program was a big mistake for NASA. It's had too many problems, never flew as often as it was supposed to, and couldn't get out of low orbit, and has been shut down too many times, and cost more than it should have per launch. It might have been ok if they could have flown monthly as was originally planned, but it never even approached that ideal.

What would have happened if they dropped the shuttle program early on, and did anything different for manned flight. The shuttle program is known more for its problems than for its successes. It never grabbed much public attention, and became more of a "another shuttle launched? when did that happen?". It didn't have a plan to evolve, so we have been stuck with the same technology for these long years. A non-reusable program would, at least, give us more chances to evolve the design.

Re:Alas

[vlm]

So what? What use is there in bringing back satellites? That's an utterly stupid requirement

You have to realize it was a cold war requirement to F with the soviets low altitude photorecon satellites. Back then they launched with actual photographic film, you know, like light sensitive celluloid or whatever. So the threat that we could scoop them up:

1) Made them launch higher, thus lower res, less payload = less film.

2) Made them threaten to put a little self destruct mechanism in the satellites, making them waste payload mass (and volume, I suppose)

Another idea was we'd deploy military sats, and if they didn't work, rather than leaving them up there for the soviets to mess with, or even worse, having them land on soviet territory, we'd just pick em up and take em home.

The last idea was, of course, being all things to all people all the time, some doofus promised we'd have 100 launches per year, so if we're up there on a .mil mission anyway every 3 days or whatever, why not stick to high res chemical photography for our own sats? Kind of like a mini-orbital unmanned space station.

So there were very solid cold war reasons to bring back sats.

You have to realize, all the design work was done in the early 70s, forty years ago. Very few electronic products have forty year runs.

Re:Bittersweet indeed

[Leebert]

Thank goodness we still have JPL and its hardy unmanned probes.

Where's the love for the JHU APL? (Note that MESSENGER is just a few days from its Mercury orbital insertion)

As to Discovery, it's particularly bittersweet to watch her retirement. I saw her launch firsthand as a kid in '85 (STS-51D), which had a big impact on me. A good part of the reason I'm (still*) at NASA today. Discovery was the orbiter for both return to flight missions. She launched HST.

I also had the privilege to watch her last launch. I admit, it almost brings a tear to my eye.

* Working at NASA was more of a right-place-right-time opportunity for me. Not leaving NASA in disgust years ago is largely due to the love of the program I have, largely instilled by that early shuttle launch.

Re:Don't worry...

[hairyfeet]

What is with all this nationalism? I thought we were all supposed to be global now? Welcome to reality, where you can't outsource all your factories and then get enough tax money to blow on things like shuttles, which BTW was supposed to be a "space truck" which never actually fulfilled its mission.

We went from 80% factory jobs at the birth of NASA to now 80% service industry (with a severe cut in pay to boot!) and the simple fact is we're broke. We're the guy writing hot checks at the Walmart to pay for Chinese goods because the national bank account is nothing but red ink. Hell if we spent within our means we probably wouldn't even have a military as big as Brazil, and we sure as hell wouldn't be fighting two endless wars.

I personally wish China and India luck, as they will eventually find what we are gonna have to wake up and accept...capitalism doesn't work with technology. There was a good reason why nobody in Star Trek was waving money around, that is because as you reach a certain technical level you don't really need human labor anymore. You think we are in bad shape now? Wait until automation hits the service industry.

Despite our brilliant leader's idea that piling ever more debt to get ever more degrees (what are we up to now, a Bachelors is the new HS diploma?) to chase ever fewer jobs the simple fact is the way we've done things for the past 4000+ years is coming to an end. The machines are faster, smarter,more accurate, and they never tire or make mistakes.

We can't all be CxOs, doctors, or IP lawyers, so you either make up BS "make work" programs to give you an excuse to cut all these people a check, you have massive unemployment and underemployment like we have now, or you find a new way. The only question is whether that new way will come peacefully or with massive riots and destruction.

So don't look at the shuttle as the end, look at it as a scary and exciting new world beginning. The old ways of doing things have failed, as evidenced by 22%+ unemployment and the fed drowning in red ink while the presses smoke from all the money being cranked out, the odds of giving the huge masses of poor jobs they can actually do is virtually nil since the machines can do them better, and outsourcing has taken most of the rest. Now the question becomes, what to do next? Do we stay on the failing road of capitalism, where the top 1% get fatter until we have another revolution, or do we try something else?

Because like it or not folks we're broke, and whether the talking heads want to admit it or not for huge masses of your fellow Americans this IS another depression. Only as we have seen we can't use war production to get us out of this one, since nothing is built here anymore.