Time Lapse of Endeavour's Final Ride

New submitter tippen writes "A year after space shuttle Endeavour reached its final resting place at the California Science Center, photographers have released a fascinating time lapse video of the shuttle's final ride from Kennedy Space Center to LAX, then through 12 miles of city streets to the museum. Sad to see the end of an era."

Comments

Re:End of an era

[0123456]

We've thrown vast amounts of money at the Third World, and it's still the Third World.

Whee.

[JeanCroix]

Now let's get on with a space program that crashes & burns less, and goes somewhere more.

Re:Whee.

[JeanCroix]

Space is a medium, not a destination. Imagine discovering the new world in 1492, then spending the next two hundred years hugging the European coast. That's what we did with the shuttle.

Back to expendable rockets

[Animats]

Space-X is now able to provide much of the capability of the space shuttle at much lower prices. (Each Space Shuttle launch ended up costing about $600 million.) Once the Falcon Heavy launches, they'll have the capability for even more lift to LEO.

Space-X even offers transportation of humans to low earth orbit. So far, NASA is the only buyer, but Space-X advertises it as a commercial service.

Re:Back to expendable rockets

[necro81]

Space-X is now able to provide much of the capability of the space shuttle at much lower prices. (Each Space Shuttle launch ended up costing about $600 million.) Once the Falcon Heavy launches, they'll have the capability for even more lift to LEO. Space-X even offers transportation of humans to low earth orbit. So far, NASA is the only buyer, but Space-X advertises it as a commercial service.

I certainly hope that the Falcon Heavy and the (astronaut-rated) Dragon crew capsule come to fruition; I believe they will. But let us not lose sight of a simple fact: those haven't actually flown yet; it's still just advertisement.

The Shuttle was not merely a crew carrier nor a heavy lift vehicle. It was rather inefficient at both tasks. However, the ability to both do heavy lifting and a have crew with it was a unique capability - essential for certain missions - that no one is likely to replicate anytime soon. A Dragon capsule would not, for instance, have been an appropriate platform for performing a Hubble repair. I'm sure the Elon's got some bright engineer thinking about how to attach a CanadArm (or equivalent) onto a Dragon, but we haven't seen that yet. I suppose you could maybe have assembled the ISS without the Shuttle, but it would have been a lot harder.

This is not to say that the Shuttle paradigm would be an appropriate way to do that combination of crew+cargo+working platform in the future. (It is debatable whether the Shuttle ever was appropriate for it.) An operating platform in LEO, useful for construction or repair, with living space for several astronaut for weeks at a time, does not need to be a machine that returns to Earth. I suspect that in the future we'll have orbiting work platforms - small versions of the ISS - that never return to Earth and that crew and cargo arrive at separately. The crucial capability that must be included in such a plan is the ability to perform significant orbital maneuvers - altitude and inclination changes, or even leaving LEO altogether.

Don't Be Short-Sighted

[Frosty Piss]

On the whole the shuttle was a boondoggle. It is best that the program is over. Yeah it had some advantages, but overall it did not deliver what it was promised to deliver.

The Shuttle Program, like all of the manned space programs before it, delivered an immense amount of technology development that has advanced our knowledge of materials sciences and engineering in general beyond any level before it.

You can't base the value of the Shuttle Project simply on some science fiction ideal of a "space plane" and what such a thing could do.

By the way, without the Shuttle Program, the Hubble Telescope would have died long ago.

Re:Don't Be Short-Sighted

[hottoh]

Frosty Piss says: "By the way, without the Shuttle Program, the Hubble Telescope would have died long ago."

The Hubble telescope sat on the ground for years due to the Shuttle (ahem) explosion. It cost 6 million a month while it while it sat at NASA. Hardly a boost to the concept the shuttle helped the Hubble. It was wholly possible the Hubble telescope was on the first failed shuttle mission. AKA, the Shuttle could have destroyed the beloved Hubble telescope that destroyed a Shuttle in 1986.

1986 was the scheduled year for the Hubble deployment (the Challenger disaster year). It cost 6 million dollars per month for the Hubble to sit on the ground. It cost more than 200 million dollars for the Hubble to sit at NASA from 1986 till 1990. The Shuttle was a boondoggle.

The Hubble, by the way, was wholly designed to be toted to space by the Shuttle. IOW, it would not exist without the Shuttle. Another aside is Sean O'Keefe nixed the final repair of the Hubble telescope, because of what? Another Shuttle was lost. It was almost not repaired for the 5th time. Thank the director following Sean O'Keefe for it. Thank the second Shuttle disaster to what? An unreliable and dangerous delivery system best know as the Space Shuttle. The same reason for the first Shuttle disaster. The Shuttle was a boondoggle.

Science fiction? Clearly you have not done your reading. The Shuttle was to have done far more than it ever delivered. The Shuttle fuel cost to launch was literally astronomical due to its sheer empty mass. It was supposed to deliver, repair, and return satellites to space. How many satellites did it bring to Earth and return? Zero. AKA, the Shuttle was a boondoggle. It was not on budget and it did not deliver what it promised, not even close on either case.

The Shuttle Program Was Short-Sighted

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

The Shuttle program should at most be considered bridge technology. NASA should have started "serious" planning for its replacement right after the first shuttle disaster. I mean, if it was going to replace it with the Orion it could have done it at least a decade earlier. Or it could have increased funding for a true SSTO (single-stage-to-orbit) spacecraft. I'm not a rocket scientist so I don't know what's the best form factor to get people into space, but any successor to the Shuttle should have already been in the live test stage by the time the Endeavor touched down for the final time.

So while I consider the Shuttle to be a marvel of engineering, I consider the Space Shuttle program as a whole to be a failure, and I'll consider the whole manned space program a failure if after all the billions poured into it, our great grandchildren would look back at the Apollo moonwalks as the Golden Era of space. As it is, Elon Musk looks like he has more vision than all of NASA's board of directors.

Re:I'm not sad, not at all.

[TWiTfan]

I can remember being told as a kid that the Shuttle was going to be like a spacecraft in the movies. It would take off under its own power, come back down and land, be refueled, and take off again. "It's going to be like an airplane for space," one of my teachers said.

Sadly, what we got was just a very expensive splash-down pod that could land on a modified airstrip instead of the ocean, with a larger crew cabin and a small cargo bay. It had to be strapped to giant nonresuable rockets to get into space, couldn't go beyond LEO when it got there, had very limited maneuvering abilities and fuel even in LEO, couldn't even land under its own power (it just glides in), and has to be almost completely rebuilt every time it lands. Oh, and it's expensive, complicated, and dangerous as fuck to boot. It's more "contractor boondoggle" than it is "Buck Rodgers."

And meanwhile, we scrapped the Apollo program and the Saturns, and all that institutional knowledge is long gone from NASA.