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Space Shuttle Endeavour's Final Journey
daveschroeder writes "After over 296 days in space, nearly 123 million miles traveled, Space Shuttle Endeavour (OV-105) is making its final journey — on the streets of Los Angeles. The last Space Shuttle to be built, the contract for Endeavour was awarded on July 31, 1987. Endeavour first launched on May 7, 1992 (video), launched for the last time on May 16, 2011 (video), and landed for the final time on June 1, 2011 (video). Endeavour then took to the skies aboard the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), completing the final ferry flight and the final flight of any kind in the Space Shuttle Program era with an aerial grand tour of southern California escorted by two NASA Dryden Flight Research Center F/A-18 aircraft on September 21, 2012 (video). This morning around 1:30AM Pacific Time, Endeavour began another journey, this one on the ground. All Space Shuttles have traveled via road from Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, CA, to Edwards Air Force Base, but this time a Space Shuttle is taking to the streets of Los Angeles for the journey from Los Angeles International Airport to its final home at the California Science Center. Getting the shuttle through LA surface streets is a mammoth logistical challenge as it lumbers along at 2 mph to the cheers of onlookers. Watching Endeavour make the journey is a sight to be seen (pictures, video)! Thank you, Endeavour!" Slashdot's Principal Software Engineer Kaushik Acharya was on hand, with camera, and took some great pictures of the event.
Slashdot has a "Principal Software Engineer"?
Who knew?
The purpose of the shuttles was never to improve a single human life. Thats is a fools game and you are a fool for trying to play it. The ultimate goal of the Space Program is an insurance policy against an extinction level event. If we waited until all humans were clothed, fed and sheltered, we would have never gotten off the ground.
Good-bye
the National Museum of the United States Air Force that is amongst a massive history of aerospace development and milestones located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the largest base of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.
I work near LAX, so I was able to watch the landing last month and walk out to see it on the ground today. They let the crowd get a lot closer to the shuttle than I was expecting: just one parking lot aisle away.
My own photos from both events: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/sets/72157631590634138/detail/
It was more military than anything, not how we leave this rock, but how can we kill each other in space and defend against the other side. Sprinkle on some PR and make everyone feel good about it and there you go, well documented worms ... fucking in space!
SCIENCE!
Nope. Ironcally nations that promise total fairness, equality and prosperity generally turn into total shitholes.
Nations that stretch their horizions expand their frontier, and search for answers have massive opportunity and progress.
What makes people more inspired, staring at the ground or looking at the stars?
People always trash the space program in general. "What has it ever done for me?" The number one thing the shuttle program has given us is knowledge, about many things. It's pretty hard to quantify either the amount of knowledge we've gained or the value of it, or its subsequent impact on the rest of our lives. The shuttles in particular delivered many payloads to orbit, including several satellites and great observatories including Hubble, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. They also delivered the Galileo, Magellan, and Ulysses spacecraft to orbit to begin their missions. They also delivered components for Mir and the ISS. NASA also has a list of some technologies that resulted from the shuttle program here.
As far as money goes, and spending it wisely, over its 30-year run the shuttle program ended up costing us just under $200 billion in 2011 dollars, as well as 14 lives. That sounds like a lot of money. The current estimate of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is between 3.2 and 4 trillion dollars, with over 4400 Americans killed and over 33,000 wounded in Iraq alone. Afghanistan has cost us another 2100 American lives, and those numbers don't even include non-Americans or civilians. In 2008 alone Bush proposed $190 billion for the wars, just under the total cost of the 30-year shuttle program. I'll leave it up to you to decide which is the better investment.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I'll also note that the margin of error alone for the cost of the wars is 4 times the total cost of the shuttle program.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I actually used to think like you - I thought most of the space program was wasted taxpayers money on ego until someone on /. pointed that (paraphrasing) ...
One nice benefit to the space program was essentially a big R&D. A lot of interesting tech was developed as we tried to solve new problems.
You'll want to read these links as they fully answer your question:
http://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/benefits.html
http://www.spaceexplorationday.us/benefits/technology.html
I'm not American, so reading this thread has suddenly given me a good insight into Pork Barrel Politics and why Americans seem to argue about things before doing anything, then do them in the most inefficient way possible. $190 billion? Shipping boosters a couple of thousands miles by road and barge? It all makes sense now.
I am impressed about the wide range of people that watched Endeavour and its carrier come in, and are watching the spacecraft move to the museum.
It was a beautiful sight as they swung around the downtown skyscrapers. The roar from pedestrians in the street reached me up the the 23rd floor, and I looked out and saw the majestic aircraft gleaming in the sun as they banked around us.
About half of us rushed to the windows and got out our cellphone cams. Yeah, we all knew we'd be getting shit video out of it, but it was more of a "You Are There" moment that was being captured.
Later that night my son had some twenty-something friends over, and we all spent some time telling our particular stories about how it was. We had something in common.
Today I was in the elevator & the monitor was showing the status of the spacecraft's progress. I rode it up & down a few times to catch the whole story. On my last ride down, a delivery guy got on and saw the video. He looked a little hassled, and said his company was on the route and it delayed him, so now he was humping to catch up. And then his face lit up and he said "but I did get to stand 20-30 feet away", and he proceeded to show me his pics.
I'll probably never see him again, but, for a moment, we had something in common.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
How are you replacing the trees that had to be removed?
The California Science Center Foundation is investing approximately $2 million to replace 400 trees removed along the route with over 1,000 trees. These replacement trees are between 10 and 14 feet in height -- about the same size as most of the trees they will be removing. A minimum of two years of free maintenance will also be provided. Within five years the community along route will have an even greener and more beautiful tree canopy.
While I applaud the engineers' achievements, I am not sure that these space shuttles' cost has been worth it. I know experiments have been done in space...but can someone really tell me what an ordinary street walking John Doe has benefited from these shuttles?
Here's an interesting one regarding software developed to determine the size of debris falling off the external tank and how it's also being used by contractors and homeowners to measure things for construction projects.
If you're looking for more, check out NASA's Spinoffs page.
I've watched a lot of different videos about the shuttles, and by far the most moving for me was one created last year by Nature to celebrate the completed shuttle program.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II7QBLt36xo&hd=1
It was built in Southern California. Houston let their Saturn V rot outside. The Houston team thought they were entitled to a shuttle and didn't put together a decent bid.
So it goes.
...neighborhoods, the first thing I thought was, "Apple really did screw up their map app".
Table-ized A.I.
The "most expensive method possible" was not used. That's why we got the shuttles in their final form in the first place. An excellent example of spending less money up front, but being forced to spend more later to work around issues on a compromised system that wouldn't have occurred if enough money had been spent on designing it right in the first place.