It's sad to see the Shuttle go without a replacement. And to jog my own memory of the day I saw the shuttle in the UK, here's a set of pictures from the day Enterprise visited Stansted Airport in the UK: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike_ward/sets/72157603394672289/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike_ward/sets/7215760339467228...</a><p>I was there as a boy standing against the wire fence with my father to see this amazing machine. Bloody marvellous!
4 among us today, in an aging vessel slipped the surly bonds of earth, and with outstretched hands touched the face of God.<p>- Borrowing from Peggy Noonan, Aaron Sorkin & John Magee
It's strange to think that in fifty years of manned spaceflight, NASA has only ever built four types of spaceship: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle. The Shuttle had a good run. It was both technically awesome and in many ways ridiculous and pointless. Anyway, time for the future now.
They did it!
Congratulations to Atlantis crew, NASA, and everyone involved. Maybe the Space Shuttle program wasn't exactly cost-effective and had it failures, but it sure sparked imagination of many, me included.
Being able to watch a live video feed of the launch is pretty amazing. Previously, TV coverage (if it existed at all) was terrible. This makes me wonder what the fate of NASA would have been if the past few generations had grown up with access to this kind of coverage. I'd like to think that NASA would have had a lot more support than they currently do.
View it in VLC
Media > Open Network Stream > Address
<a href="http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1368163" rel="nofollow">http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1368163</a>
In 1979, I watched the Enterprise+transporter fly in to Kennedy for the first time from the Indian River - that was a long time ago. Hell, it's even been 25 years since I turned on the TV to see Dan Rather using a model to explain the various external tanks and knew something bad had happened.<p>So while it is the passing of an era, with the ISS at the sharp point of manned space flight, I'm not about to let nostalgia cloud the objective fact that it doesn't matter whose hardware gets us off the ground and out toward the stars.<p>[edit] But that's not to imply that shuttle launches aren't really cool.
There's no timer on the feed, but at the moment they appear to be vacuuming. I'll take that as a sign that it's not going to launch in the next hour.<p>Anybody have an actual time when that's supposed to happen?
It's sad to see that we are retiring the US Shuttle program. In a recent article in the Economist about how the space race is now dead, the US is now are reliant on other countries to send folks up into space or the ISS ... even though they are planning on retiring the ISS in 2020.<p>I'm hoping that the privatization of the space programs (like SpaceX or Virgin Galatic) gets enough interest to fuel more funding and research into space travel though only a handful of rich folks could ever pay for a ride in one of those programs ...
Just saw it from Cape Canaveral. Quite an extraordinary feeling to watch and feel the very last shuttle take off. What makes it even better is that there was only a 30% chance that the shuttle would take off due to the weather. In my mind I'd written it off, being an entrepreneur, I should've known better than to do that :-P
This was an amazing, historical moment of our time. I even ran outside to grab my two-year-old son so he could watch it on TV with me. (Although he doesn't understand the significance, he keep saying "Space ship, daddy! Space ship!")<p>Hopefully, mankind will continue the exploration of space...
There is a bigger version of the video here:<p><a href="http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/135_splash/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/135_splash/index.html</a>
It's somewhat sad to see the shuttles go, especially without a replacement immediately to hand. Though hopefully the end up the shuttle program will pave the way for a manned launch vehicle that can get us out of LEO.
I find the Nasa stream is timing out. The UStream one is more stable for me:<p><a href="http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ustream.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ustream.html</a>
<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/NASA/status/89341036589101059" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/NASA/status/89341036589101059</a><p>"The countdown has entered a 45-minute hold at T-9 minutes."