Endeavour Soars Over California
Photo: Looking Up At Endeavour
@yembrick “So close to Endeavour that the entire bird doesnt fit in my iPhone pic. #OV105 #spotheshuttle #NASASocial”
NASA Invites Californians to Participate in Endeavour Flyover
“The orbiter, atop its 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), is scheduled to fly over northern California and a large area of the Los Angeles basin beginning at about 8:15 a.m. PDT.”
Photo: Space Shuttle Endeavour Flies over NASA Ames Research Center
“This photo was taken from the NASA Research Park at Moffett Field on 21 September as Space Shuttle Endeavour made a low level flyover. Credit: SkyCorp.”
Space Shuttle Discovery: Old Friend, New Neighbor, earlier post
“As soon as I got onto the airport itself the roads were lined thick on either side with cars – and more were parking every second. People had walked up onto bridges where you never see pedestrians. Others congregated in the grassy regions inside of entrance and exit ramps. Again, these are places you simply never see people – much less crowds. This was an immense flash mob that appeared so fast that the police did not have time to respond. No one was directing traffic yet everyone seemed to be cool about being considerate and safe.”
Wanted to go take photos of it over the GG Bridge but then I go and injure my foot today.
I have no luck.
Shuttle is getting more attention after program conclusion than it did during the program, where it was taken for granted.
Mr. C,
I suspect for a lot of us seeing the Shuttle was something that we really intended to do some day, and for a long time there was no rush. Then it all changed seemingly rather quickly, and course, life has a habit of getting in the way. At least they’re on display and (hopefully) being taken care of for a long time (unlike the Saturn V lawn ornament), so the rest of us will still have a chance to see one some day.
I’ve always loved the piggy-back on the 747 pictures. It’s something so unexpected and unusual that it looks very cool.
Steve
Steve launches were exciting but you were looking at the Shuttle from several miles away. When you get to see one from a few feet away I think you will be quite impressed. I saw Discovery at Udvar-Hazey a few weeks ago and it looked like it just dropped in from space. Surprisingly for me the emotional moment was not seeing the Shuttle, it was when I saw the ordinary looking placard in front of it that said “Space Shuttle Discovery”. That’s when it really hit home that these are now museum pieces.
We take roads for granted, that does not mean we don’t like them.
35 years from now when the Orion retires, they’ll truck the capusles across the country for all to see.
Capsules are perceived more like space lifeboats, Shuttles were space ships.
I thought SPACESHIPS didn’t come back to earth??
Isn’t the Orion team building a spaceship that is big and sexy and makes gravity and has raditation protection systems to make space travel SAFE. I thought NASA was working on all that while the commercial guys do the old earth to leo trick on the cheap!
Yeah, truck them instead of flying them. Big progress here!
It is so thrilling that people were so excited to see Endeavour. Great crowds in Tucson yesterday, at the University, Downtown, all over the valley.
Hordes of people at Ames, all screaming when it flew overhead. Media out in force, zillions with their cams and iPhones pointing skyward, pedestrian bridges packed, traffic snarled, people on tops of buildings, all was great fun. Downer is we will never see something like this again.
That Orbital looks so beautiful and perfect on the back of the airplane.
How I wish we could have kept the program alive but downsized it with Mini Orbital version (or Orbital Mini).
Continuing the legacy of the Space Shuttle program but scaled down to meet the challenges of today’s requirements (smaller, cheaper, and faster).
This should have been the replacement. What a lost!
http://www.newscientist.com…
“That Orbital looks so beautiful and perfect on the back of the airplane.”
I’ve always liked aerial shots of the flying shuttle with a city in the background. Like shots of astronauts watching Earth in the ISS cupola, it’s somehow more human-scale, more “real”.
“How I wish we could have kept the program alive but downsized it with Mini Orbital version”
[and X-37B]
The X-37A exists and is a working ship. So that knowledge isn’t going away. And there’s two other mini-shuttle crew carriers in development. One orbital, one sub-orbital. So the basic idea hasn’t been abandoned.
“Continuing the legacy of the Space Shuttle program but scaled down to meet the challenges of today’s requirements (smaller, cheaper, and faster).”
Would have been even better if it had been the path to the full sized shuttle, rather than the path from. Eg, a 4-man VTHL replacement for the Apollo capsule, for Skylab work in the ’70s. A shuttle-C style cargo lifter by the 1980, to develop the shuttle-stack. Leading to a second generation full sized manned/cargo shuttle by the mid-eighties. Even small changes would have made the shuttle a better system, things they would have learned by the second version. And it still stuns me that the very first launch of the shuttle stack was a manned flight.
That was also the problem with the path shuttle-replacement development in the ’80s and ’90s, the desire to again jump five generations to a super futuristic version (such as NASP/VentureStar), rather than incrementally developing a Shuttle MkII, III, IV…
An elderly fellow on the hilltop overlooking Griffith Observatory looked at the giant crowd below after the last flyover with Endeavour and commented “I don’t think the Gemini program got a send off like that!”
For a program that supposedly no one was interested in any more, I think the genuine thrill that people of all ages expressed in this last passage of the space shuttle is something to think about. I think most enthusiasm was lost post -Challenger, when crowds no longer could gather at Dryden FRC to see landings. Making things accessible keeps them in people’s minds. Any other ideas?