Endeavor Launch Pad Being Rebuilt Piece By Piece

dangle writes "The Exposition Park museum in LA is working to rebuild the Endeavor launch stack, a display that will take thousands of pieces to complete due to parts that are scattered at NASA facilities, museums and other places across the U.S. Most are one of a kind and impossible to replicate. Dennis Jenkins, who spent his entire 30-plus year career sending the shuttles into space, is playing a key role in locating essential parts using his own and his colleagues' institutional memory. Employed by NASA contractor Martin Marietta, he helped write the software used in loading and controlling the liquid oxygen needed to launch the 2,250-ton shuttle assembly into low Earth orbit. Now, with the program part of a bygone era of exploration, the 57-year-old works for the California Science Center, helping officials figure out how to rebuild Endeavour."

Comments

Re:Shuttle was OK, I suppose.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Considering that it was how we moved big stuff in to space and current relations with Russia going south (with Russia being our only ticket to the ISS), we better get to those "potential future programs" pretty damn fast.

Here is - quite literally - a fu*king rocket scientist devoting his time and energy NOT towards building a better world or improving the advancement of our society. Instead, he's spearheading a massive effort to construct a self-congratulatory museum-piece.

If you want a textbook illustration for the meaning of "decadence" in the context of a civilization, you can read it in the above.