Discovery

Mar 09, 2011 10:27

I watched the Discovery shuttle make its last landing this morning. The shuttles have been around as long as I can remember. Even as a small child I though they were the coolest thing ever ( Read more... )

shuttle discovery space final

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technoshaman March 9 2011, 20:48:51 UTC
Oh, but there is. It hasn't gotten a lot of press, for whatever reason, but SpaceX's Dragon is the designated replacement for the shuttle; they are scheduled to do a cargo-only flight to ISS later this year. The capsule is designed to be not only man-capable, in a very Apollo-looking fashion, but re-usable, a lot more re-usable than the shuttle. The goal is to get the *entire* spacecraft to be re-usable for several hundred cycles - boosters, capsule, the whole shebang.

I forget where it is, but tickets to the official areas for the launch are on sale right this second. 'course, that's subject to mission scrub, etc.

And I do think we can get some unity out of the idea of going to space as a species. 120,000 people watched the re-entry live on Ustream, from Europe, Japan, Argentina, all over the world. I didn't see any Arabic go by, but I was sure getting katakana a LOT...

I've seen a shuttle launch. STS-48, Discovery ironically, with UARS aboard... It's pretty impressive.

I wanna RIDE SpaceShipTwo. You game? (Money no object, of course. :)

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