Very interesting: Twenty-four years after the Challenger disaster, new footage of the shuttle’s catastrophic explosion has surfaced, depicting the space shuttle’s disintegration over the Atlantic Ocean.
I find America’s space programs fascinating – it will be interesting to see how the recently planned budget cuts may affect the upcoming Constellation program.
The shuttle program is being phase out early 2011 and only a handful of missions are left. I’m planning a May trip to Cape Canaveral to witness this large piece of America history.
This may be the ultimate geek-out, but I thought I’d write a bit about the recent shuttle mission and why I find it so interesting.
There’s less than 8 missions remaining for the space shuttle before NASA transitions to their new vehicle. It’s hard to watch a launch or follow the shuttle in orbit and remember that the shuttle and much of it’s technology is outdated by decades. The coming of NASA’s new program is exciting, but I think with these last few missions comes a bittersweet feeling of all the history and strides the shuttle program made through the years. It’s something to stop and think about. Also, I need to get to FL to watch a launch and witness history.
STS-125′s extended mission lasted 14 days, much longer than normal since they attempted to wait for Florida’s weather to clear to avoid landing in California (which they ultimately did). Landing at Edward’s Air Force Base in California costs 2 million dollars more than the standard landing. Even NASA is watching it’s spending in this economic environment.
Michael T. Good, STS-125′s Missions Specialist 1 was born in Parma, Ohio and graduated from Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School in Broadview Heights, Ohio. This is something Cleveland should be proud of – and I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about Good in the news these past few weeks.
This was the final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope – again, really interesting to think about all of the strides the Hubble made and to think that this is the last time human hands will touch the telescope. Astronauts performed a series of spacewalks to upgrade the telescopes components – I’m looking forward to seeing what these upgrades are capable of since previous images produced by the Hubble are nothing short of amazing.
Shuttle Endeavor sat on it’s launch pad awaiting a possible mission (STS-400) to rescue the crew of Atlantis in the event of mission failure. STS-125 was a high risk mission and there’s only been a few times where another shuttle has been on a launch pad standing by. This was really a Bruce Willis movie about to happen in real life had something gone wrong with STS-125, but thankfully he was never called. In any event, twin shuttles makes for a cool picture.
Amateur Astronomer Thierry Legault made this one of kind photograph from the ground of the Space shuttle Atlantis as the shuttle was passing between the sun and the earth.
Michael T. Good talks about his first job, a garbage man in Cleveland, Ohio.
