Time Lapse of Endeavour's Final Ride 59
New submitter tippen writes "A year after space shuttle Endeavour reached its final resting place at the California Science Center, photographers have released a fascinating time lapse video of the shuttle's final ride from Kennedy Space Center to LAX, then through 12 miles of city streets to the museum. Sad to see the end of an era."
The Shuttle Program Was Short-Sighted (Score:4, Interesting)
The Shuttle program should at most be considered bridge technology. NASA should have started "serious" planning for its replacement right after the first shuttle disaster. I mean, if it was going to replace it with the Orion it could have done it at least a decade earlier. Or it could have increased funding for a true SSTO (single-stage-to-orbit) spacecraft. I'm not a rocket scientist so I don't know what's the best form factor to get people into space, but any successor to the Shuttle should have already been in the live test stage by the time the Endeavor touched down for the final time.
So while I consider the Shuttle to be a marvel of engineering, I consider the Space Shuttle program as a whole to be a failure, and I'll consider the whole manned space program a failure if after all the billions poured into it, our great grandchildren would look back at the Apollo moonwalks as the Golden Era of space. As it is, Elon Musk looks like he has more vision than all of NASA's board of directors.
Re:I'm not sad, not at all. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can remember being told as a kid that the Shuttle was going to be like a spacecraft in the movies. It would take off under its own power, come back down and land, be refueled, and take off again. "It's going to be like an airplane for space," one of my teachers said.
Sadly, what we got was just a very expensive splash-down pod that could land on a modified airstrip instead of the ocean, with a larger crew cabin and a small cargo bay. It had to be strapped to giant nonresuable rockets to get into space, couldn't go beyond LEO when it got there, had very limited maneuvering abilities and fuel even in LEO, couldn't even land under its own power (it just glides in), and has to be almost completely rebuilt every time it lands. Oh, and it's expensive, complicated, and dangerous as fuck to boot. It's more "contractor boondoggle" than it is "Buck Rodgers."
And meanwhile, we scrapped the Apollo program and the Saturns, and all that institutional knowledge is long gone from NASA.