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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."
We've thrown vast amounts of money at the Third World, and it's still the Third World.
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.
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.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.