The plane crash, of course, will cause a colossal amount of chaos, especially so close to the Shuttle. Police and air traffic controllers and all available officials will be focused on the crashed plane, giving the Swiss their opening. When the chaos is at its climax, a fleet of 10 Sikorsky CH-53E heavy lift helicopters wearing NASA Emergency Rescue livery will show up, and heroically inform everyone that they’re here to take the Shuttle to a more secure location, away from the fire, and all that, back at LAX. In these circumstances, who’s going to question ten official-looking choppers? The workers will help secure the tow lines to the Shuttle, and they’ll watch the choppers take the precious spacecraft off to safety.
Footage of the final flight of the decommissioned Space Shuttle Endeavour, atop its Boeing 747 transporter aircraft, as it flies over Los Angeles and Hollywood, among other places, on its way to the California Science Center, where it will eventually go on display.
Check out the landing at Los Angeles International Airport though… I’m thinking a pilot would need nerves of steel to land a double-decker aircraft like that.
While living and working in space was a tremendous experience, it also presented us with many challenges. Some of which aren’t so obvious. Photographically speaking, there were a number of hurdles. The dynamic range of the subject was potentially huge. The darkest darks you can imagine along with the brightest highlights. With no atmosphere, there is probably another stop or two of light on bright subjects. I would guess that the dynamic range of some scenes approaches 16 or 17 stops.
His write up also offers some candid insights into living and working aboard both a Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. Nothing at all like the orbiting Hilton hotel from 2001: A Space Odyssey, though no less exhilarating I’m sure.
Loads of photos and videos of the Space Shuttle Enterprise on its flight, atop a 747, from Washington, D.C. to New York a few days ago have emerged, but this video, filmed at Vimeo HQ, is the one I liked the most.
Photos of the Space Shuttles in various stages of decommissioning. It still seems odd that there’ll no more scheduled Space Shuttle launches any more. Even though they weren’t taking us all that far into space, it still felt as if there was some progress was being made.
Starting next month, NASA will begin delivering its four Space Shuttle orbiters to their final destinations. After an extensive decommissioning process, the fleet – which includes three former working spacecraft and one test orbiter – is nearly ready for public display. On April 17, the shuttle Discovery will be attached to a modified 747 Jumbo Jet for transport to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Virginia. Endeavour will go to Los Angeles in mid-September, and in early 2013, Atlantis will take its place on permanent display at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. Test orbiter Enterprise will fly to New York City next month.
Cameras mounted to one of the rocket boosters of a Space Shuttle record segments of its round trip from Earth, first during the launch, then its separate return to the surface, and splash down in the ocean.
And since I was bound to make a 2001: A Space Odyssey reference sooner or later, the re-entry phase somehow brought to mind the film’s star gate sequence… minus much of the psychedelia of course.
A father and his son probably achieved something few others did by being present at both the launch of the first space shuttle flight on 12 April 1981, and then the final mission thirty years later, on 8 July 2011.
The first photo is one of our favorites, and we thought it would be fun to document our “bookend experience” by taking a similar one. My mother, Ginny, took the first photo, and my girlfriend, Chelsea, took the second. We weren’t terribly preoccupied with making an exact replica of the picture. We just wanted something similar to document both experiences, provide a bit of nostalgia and novelty, honor the shuttle and the passage of time, and illustrate the father/son bond that we share.
A compromise tends to leave everyone unhappy, and 30 years on so it proved with the shuttle. The costs continued to rankle with those who thought manned space flight a waste of money, and three decades spent stuck in low-Earth orbit never stopped frustrating those who wanted to go farther. Michael Griffin, a former NASA boss, argued in 2007 that the shuttle had cost so much money and time that it had held back the agency for decades. Had NASA persisted with the much bigger Saturn rockets that powered the moon missions, argued Mr Griffin, launch costs would be lower, the agency would have had more money for science and deep-space exploration, and astronauts might have visited Mars already.
