I just watched it overfly LAX from the balcony, with binoculars. I’ll also see it again later, when it makes its final approach to land.
[Update a while later]
Wow. It made a runway flyover at LAX, then a left turn over the ocean, and just flew right over the house before heading east to Downey. I’ll try to get some pics up later.
You should have been up here where it did a low pass on the runway parallel to the flight line. We were about as close as you get to a flying 747, let alone a Shuttle.
My brother was fourtunate enough to be in his driveway in New Orleans when it flew directly over his house. What are the odds.
a bunch of my non-space nerd friends were watching and offered this comment : the current approach of flying the thing around on top of a 747 is much better in all respects: cheaper, safer, more photo ops. they should have thought of that earlier
This seems like it has a tinge of cargo cult to it….
It going to a museum… never to do anything useful ever again…
why the excitement?
And I understand that it flew over Downey.
Was there last week. The rubble was heartbreaking. The only light moment was that I saw the Surplus Sales building is still for sale.
Seems appropriate I guess.
My better half saw me watching it take off the other morning and asked me what was going on, so I told her. Her response was classic I thought and it’s WHY we no longer have any space capability.
“…what do you mean they’re ‘retiring’ ALL the space shuttles, when did they decide THAT? How will we git into space? Do we still have the space station?”
And I swear it was just that staccato, I couldn’t get a word in. When I answered her questions (and thanks to this blog I knew what has been going on NASA wise) she sort of remembered me talking about this stuff, and even remembered me talking about the privateers.
When she asked me about ‘all’ the money that NASA used to get, going elsewhere because they didn’t need it anymore, she was HOT about wasted money.
“…but how can they get BILLIONS of dollars every year and NOT have a space program too!”
I think she’s quite average in her knowledge level and understanding of what she ‘thought’ NASA has been doing, and that the average voter thinks they’ll continue to do. I’d like to see one of the walking reporter type bloggers go outside and find 50 or 100 people and see how many know we don’t have gub’ment LEO launches anymore, we don’t have private space programs yet, and what does NASA’s money go for now.
Wheels stop.
And with that, shuttle Endeavour, perched atop its 747 carrier, parks at LAX to roll into retirement. A 25-year old, roughly $3.5 billion space age artifact, destined for display at the California Science Center in downtown Los Angeles. Shipping and delivery costs- estimated at $28 million. Sister ship Discovery is already on display at the NASM annex outside Washington, D.C.; test bed Enterprise was barged to the USS Intrepid along the Hudson in Manhattan for view and Atlantis will be displayed at KSC in Florida.
The space shuttle era is over. And that’s as it should be.
The program, spanning more than three decades, is benchmarked with multiple successes and two deadly, disastrous failures. The accomplishments are easily researched- from deploying (repairing and servicing) the Hubble Space Telescope to assembling the ISS, refining space walking and habitation techniques- even carrying Russian cosmonauts- once fierce rivals in the space race of the 1960s [when NASA’s share of the federal budget was roughly 4% as opposed the one half of 1% today]- up to and back from space.
Advocates of course know why it was time to ground these birds. The march of technology for one (shuttle was mid-70s engineering and upgraded to the max over the decades)– and the cost of simply maintaining and operating the fleet, along with the support teams, had become prohibitive. Fated similarly to Concorde, shuttles are relics of out-dated policies, victims of changing economics, advances in engineering and shifts in priorities from the last century. They have earned their places in museums.
Originally sold in the Nixon era as a reusable system to deliver large payloads to low Earth orbit (LEO) with reduced launch costs and a two week turnaround, shuttle never came close to fulfilling that sales pitch. It was never truly ‘operational’ and always ‘experimental’ by nature. And by design. In the end, shuttle was costing roughly $1 billion/launch when the program came to a close. And the turnaround times were measured in many months, not a few weeks. Re certification for flight – mandatory per the CAIB report- was cost-prohibitive as well. And post Challenger and Columbia accidents [sourced to both poor management and flawed engineering] the total down time can be counted in years. Still, compared to its capsuled predecessors, the versatile, winged space glider was an engineering marvel, rivaling, if not surpassing Apollo in technical achievement for human spaceflight (HSF).
The immediate issue, of course, is the famed ‘gap’– something Apollo veterans Gene Cernan, Jim Lovell and the late Neil Armstrong, among others, expressed alarm and concern about in Congressional testimony and various OpEds as well. [There was a six year ‘gap’ between Apollo and shuttle but there was work being done.] President George W. Bush accepted the recommendations of the CAIB report, terminated shuttle and proposed developing elements of Project Constellation as an overlap to minimize the gap, shifting shuttle funding and base technologies into a new program, a government space project of scale, to move beyond LEO and return Americans to the moon, refine methods, procedures and hardware- then press on eventually to Mars. Unfortunately, like GHWBush’s space initiative in 1989, neither Dubya’s Dad nor Dubya pressed Congress for adequate funding. And in the case of Constellation, poor management and cost overruns in development of the Ares rocket- the base launch system which the entire Constellation program was planned around- all but devoured available funding.
When President Obama was elected, aerospace panels, industry execs and competing camps inside NASA concluded the numbers made it all but certain Constellation could not meet its projected target dates even with immediate increases in funding- a luxury clearly unaffordable in austere times. The economics forced the shelving of Constellation and a re-think on access to LEO, via government contracting and subsidizing the development of ‘private enterprise’ space firms (like Space X and others) making the best use of existing assets and through purchasing rides on the 40-plus year old, reliably operated, Russian Soyuz, for astronauts bound for extended-stays aboard the ISS, which has Russia as a partner. Russian unmanned Progress spacecraft continue to deliver supplies as well. In addition, Congress continues to support development of the SLS (the Space Launch System) and its proposed, heavy lift rocket, similar to the Saturn V moon rocket from Apollo days, and the development of the Orion spacecraft to press on out to beyond Earth orbit (BEO) objectives. (The Rabid Right routinely, and wrongly, chides Mr. Obama for canceling shuttle. Dubya did. And avoid acknowledging Mr. Obama’s support of private sector, commercial space initiatives.)
But costs and management problems continue to plague the civil space agency– with in-fighting below the media radar. The JWST is a fiscal mess, with astronomical cost overruns now in the $15 billion-plus range and all the characteristics of an out-of-control, big science jobs program, similar to the doomed Super Collider a generation ago. And unlike the HST, JWST cannot be serviced in the event of a failure. Costs for the latest Mars rover, Curiosity, soared to roughly $2.5 billion, in an era when the cost of throw-away, unmanned space probes should be dropping, like disposable electronics are dropping worldwide. (Its two predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity cost a third of Curiosity.)
These massive, government financed, civil space projects of scale have been scaled back- or outright terminated- because in an era when the government has to borrow 42 cents of every dollar it spends, they are easy targets as high-profiled luxuries America cannot afford. Which makes the crocodile tears from flag-waving commentators over shuttle’s end all the more amusing. Conservatives and progressives will point out that the civil space program has strong national defense overlays beyond the obvious soft power projection and emotional point of national pride. To be sure, shuttle had DoD ties- which affected how the orbiters were designed and funded through development- but the DoD bailed on shuttle after the 1986 Challenger accident, mothballed its multi-billion dollar launch pad at Vandenberg AFB and returned to using less costly, more reliable and timely, ELVs (expendable launch vehicles). And poll after poll over the years has shown public support for the space program waxes and wanes, but in general remains broad but shallow.
The $100 billion-plus ISS, doomed to a Pacific grave, originally proposed by President Reagan nearly 30 years ago, continues to sail on (at roughly $3 billion/yr., in operations costs) and should remain in orbit until splashed in the early 2020s. Still, it is a relic of late 20th century Cold War planning; an aerospace ‘WPA project’ as the late Deke Slayton called it. Today, it is an ‘orbiting zombie,’ an expensive platform sustained with dubious and shifting rationales and questionable return when subjected to down-to-earth, 21st century cost-benefit analyses. But it is splendid engineering; a bright point of pride in the night skies.
However, it is inaccurate for media types, from Brian Williams to Chris Wallace, to declare America’s HSF program ‘dead.’ SLS is in development, Orion in work and ‘private-enterprised,’ crewed spacecraft are on the horizon. But compared to the half century of United States HSF projects of scale, it will seem a lengthy gap; a muted decade of under-reported busy work and experimentation, full of potential and promise. Until, perhaps, a new competitor, eager to hallmark this century as their own with their own ‘endeavor,’ draws attention with a challenge and launches out toward the moon. Luna awaits fresh footprints, in the hear and now of a new century, as the PRC well knows. The question is whether the Americans of today– the same Americans who cheered and waved as Endeavour flew over the Los Angeles basin– will be contented to watch it all unfold on their IPads— made, of course, in China.
Austere times? We must be living in different times. The times I live in have been accompanied by an unprecedented level of spending.
Nice post though 🙂
Would like to see RS’s images if he finds time to post’em. Saw Enterprise do a low-and-slow over Manhattan back in the early 80’s when shuttle was young and full of promise. It’s a grand and memorable sight and those who saw endeavour – or Discovery for that matter- won’t forget it.
Postscript. R– Hope your recent surgery went well.