Discovery Last Ride Ends NASA Space Flights

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Spectacular Flight over Nation's Capitol Slams Door into Space

President Obama decided the NASA Space Program was unnecessary and he terminated over 30 years of American dominance in space.  We now have to hitch rides on Russian rockets to even reach the International Space Station.

Today was bittersweet for space enthusiasts as Discovery took it's last flight mounted atop NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft flying from Florida to the nation's capitol where it made a rare flight over the Mall at the Capitol.  It is to be housed forever in the Smithsonian Space exhibit by Dulles Airport.

The Space Shuttle Discovery is the longest-serving orbiter. It was flown 39 times from 1984 through 2011 — more missions than any of its sister ships — spending altogether 365 days in space. Want to know more about the Discovery?

• In 2000, the Discovery flew 100th shuttle mission.

• Discovery launched on its final flight to the International Space Station on the STS-133 mission February 24, 2011.

• Three Hubble Space Telescope flights (1990 deployment and 2 servicing visits, 1997, 1999).

• Two flights were to the Russian space station Mir (1995, 1998).

• Thirteen flights went to the International Space Station (1999-2011).

• It orbited the Earth 5,830 times and traveled 148,221,675 miles.

A bit more trivia about the Space Shuttle Discovery:

The shuttle was named after other famous ships of exploration, such as the HMS Discovery which accompanied English explorer James Cook and Henry Hudson’s ship Discovery, which he used to look for the Northwest Passage.

A rather famous fictional spaceship from Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is named Discovery One. You may not remember that, but I bet you remember the name of the onboard computer: HAL 9000.

In 1998, Discovery carried astronaut (and senator) John Glenn, who was 77 at the time, back in space, giving him the record of oldest person to go into space. Incidentally, this also made him the third seated politician to fly in space.

Utah Senator Jake Garn is the first sitting member of the United States Congress to fly in space. He was the payload specialist onboard Discovery’s STS-51-D mission in 1985. The second seated politician to fly in space is then Florida Representative (now Senator) Bill Nelson, who flew in 1986 onboard the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Jake Garn was also the world’s first space tourist. Actually, was also a guinea pig: his mission was to be subjected to tests designed to increase understanding of space motion sickness. He had motion sickness so severe that NASA named the "Garn scale" of space sickness after him. Upon his return to Congress, his Senate colleagues and promptly called him by his new nickname: "Barfin’ Jake" (bestowed by cartoonist Garry Trudeau in his Doonesbury strip).

After his return, Jake Garn co-authored a fiction called Night Launch (published in 1989), in which terrorists take over the Space Shuttle Discovery during the first NASA-USSR space shuttle flight.

President Bill Clinton watched John Glenn’s return to space from the Kennedy Space Center, making him the first (and only) US President to attend a Shuttle launch.

Discovery also carried the first (and so far only) member of royalty in space: Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, grandson of King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia.

Space Shuttle Discovery was the first shuttle to fly after both the

Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1988 and 2003, respectively.

It’s not all fun and science onboard the Space Shuttle Discovery: it has carried many classified payloads. In one such mission in 1985, the shuttle crew reportedly launched a secret satellite for the Department of Defense and the National Reconnaissance Office called Magnum. Or so we heard.

Discovery was the shuttle that launched the Hubble Space Telescope and the Ulysses probe (designed to study the sun).

In 1999, Mission Specialist Daniel T. Barry brought along his favorite game, the first copy of computer game in space, StarCraft. The game CD now resides in Blizzard’s home office after orbiting the Earth 153 times and traveling 3.5 million nautical miles.

It also was the first shuttle to "recover" communication satellites which orbit went bad because of motor malfunctions. In 1984, Space Shuttle Discover successfully captured Palapa B-2 and Westar 6 satellites. After recovering the satellites, crewmember Dale Gardner then posed for this famous picture:

The external tank of the shuttle had to be repaired in 1995, due to damage done by birds! NASA discovered that Northern Flicker Woodpeckers pecked about 200 holes in the foam insulation on Discovery’s fuel tank.

They promptly installed noisemakers and physical deterrents to scare off the woodpeckers. Also, they added a permanent human "woodpecker spotters" at launch pads around the clock!

In this mission, Discovery also carried Sweden’s first astronaut, Christer Fuglesang.

Farewell old friend...
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Nine Years Ago Today the Columbia Shuttle Exploded

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Last Launch of Columbia 2003

From The New York Times

When the first space shuttle, Columbia, blasted off in 1981, the craft were meant by NASA to be the workhorses of a new era in space exploration. When the program came to an end in 2011, the shuttles had come to be synonymous with tragedy — the accidents that destroyed the Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 — and a great leap forward in our ability to understand the universe.

Unlike the rockets that brought astronauts to the moon, the shuttles were orbiters designed for repeated use on missions into space. Each shuttle also had the ability to carry satellites and other large payloads into space, and could transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

After decades of use, the shuttles had just about reached the end of their useful lives. The Bush administration announced in 2004 that it would bring the program to a close.

First Shuttle Launch 1981 - Columbia

The end came as the space shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop just before 6 a.m. on July 21, 2011. During its 13-day mission, Atlantis had ferried 8,000 pounds of supplies and spare parts to the International Space Station; with the retirement of the shuttles, the space station will now rely on Russian, European and Japanese rockets to bring up supplies.

In all, NASA built five shuttles for space flight — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. The first flight was made by Columbia on April 12, 1981. Three of the shuttles still exist today.

Columbia Explodes Before Landing

The Challenger exploded after takeoff on its 10th mission in 1986, killing all seven astronauts on board, including a New Hampshire civilian. And the Columbia broke apart as it was reentering the atmosphere in 2003, also killing its seven astronauts. After both disasters, review panels issued scathing reports, saying that pressures to complete missions and a more general culture of complacency had led officials to underestimate risks.

End of an Era

The program leaves behind a giant question mark over the future of manned space flight, with a replacement a distant reality.
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At the direction of the Obama administration and Congress, NASA is developing a large new rocket to send deep into space. No destination has been selected, however, and money is tight. NASA is also trying to nurture a commercial industry that will loft astronauts toward the stars. But the ventures, which involve partnerships with private-sector companies like SpaceX and Boeing, focus on hardware development and so far have no declared goals beyond low orbits around the planet. The shuttles did that for decades, starting in 1981.

NASA is also counting on two commercial companies, the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif., and the Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., to begin cargo flights in 2012.