This Week’s Science Blog: Shuttle Show
I’m sure a bunch of you have seen this already, but it’s a pretty spectacular thing so I’d like to put it up here.
Shuttle program stats and info:
- 135 flights total between the five shuttles (Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour)
- Longest flight: 17 days, 15 hours, 53 minutes, 18 seconds (Columbia)
- First lunch: April 12, 1981 (Columbia)
- Last launch: May 16, 2011
- Total earth orbits: 21,158
- Says Wiki: “Each vehicle was designed with a projected lifespan of 100 launches, or 10 years’ operational life.”
Now sit back and watch some launches, if you haven’t already done so.
TWSB: “Space Debris”
Today NASA is celebrating 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle launch. How? By announcing the final resting places of four retired spacecrafts: Enterprise, Discovery, Endeavor, and Atlantis.
Apparently there’s been quite a lot of vying over who gets the retired shuttles—21 official proposals were submitted to NASA, some with petitions 150,000 signatures strong behind them, others with plans to construct dedicated buildings to house the shuttles.
In the end, though, NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced that the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum, a wing of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, the California Science Center, and the Kennedy Space Center won out for the Enterprise, Discovery, Endeavor, and Atlantis, respectively.
Smaller shuttle artifacts, like fuselage trainers and commander seats, are being offered to various other museums, according to NASA. And those museums may be better off financially when it all comes down to it—the four winning spaces will have to find room and money to house these 170,000 pound, 122 feet long giants.
Totally worth it though, right? I’d definitely hang with a shuttle if I got the chance.
It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad, ma–oh, wait.
Odd dream last night:
I am with this group of people, including my dad. We are at his space shuttle launch, and we’re going into space. There is this lady with a little girl about 5 years old. Suddenly, as we’re getting on the shuttle, I am no longer with the group. Instead, my mom and I are in the car with the sunroof open, driving on this road in between the launch site and the ocean. I seem to be hearing my dad’s voice from off somewhere, as well as the voices of the little girl and the mother. The little girl is asking her mother for some crackers just as the shuttle launches. I am watching this from inside the car and I notice that the lift-off was a little shaky. I am thinking that they are going to crash. They go over the car in a circle, and crash into the ocean on the other side with flames and explosions. My mom goes, “what happened?” and I say, “Didn’t you see it? The shuttle was lined up with the towers and it lifted off and crashed.” Then I was back in my dorm room. Almost nobody was there–they had all died int he shuttle crash. I kept thinking that the shuttle had just crash-landed in the water and that no one was really hurt and that we should just go back and get the survivors.
WTF? Freud would have a field day.
If there’s a space shuttle crash in the near future, I totally called it.
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