Starry Skies Network

It’s often said that when traveling, how you get where you’re going is more important more than where you end up. For the space shuttle Enterprise, its journey to the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum in New York City is one no one will soon forget as much as they might want to. During its maritime transit, NASA’s first shuttle had its wing clipped.

Two retired shuttle ferry flights down, one to go.
Enterprise touched down for the last time at John F. Kennedy Airport at 11:22 a.m. today after flying low over the Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson River atop a 747 carrier aircraft.

The first and last astronauts to fly on the space shuttle met Nov. 2 in Houston, Texas to pose for a series of historic photographs.

As the Apollo space program was winding down in 1970, NASA leaders had considered closing their rocket testing operations in Hancock County.

My seven-year-old son, Cliff, watched the last space shuttle launch from the NASA viewing stands at the Kennedy Space Center. He had a spiritual experience of a kind that no amount of dragging him to Mass or even Fenway Park has inspired. His little face​—​seemingly made up entirely of open eyes​—​announced it: “This is awe!” He didn’t need to say anything and, having forgotten to breathe, he probably couldn’t. Indeed, for the first waking moment in his 89 months on earth, he was silent.

NASA’s shuttle Atlantis and the eerie green glow of the Southern Lights serve as a dazzling sight in a new photo snapped by astronauts from the International Space Station.
The photo was taken Thursday (July 14) by an astronaut on the space station during NASA’s final shuttle mission, the STS-135 flight of Atlantis.

The shuttle Atlantis crew was fast asleep last night when a computer shutdown triggered an alarm, jarring the weary astronauts out of their sleeping bags.

The pilots on NASA’s last space shuttle flight fixed another one of their main computers Friday after it failed and set off an alarm that shattered their sleep.
NASA declared all five of Atlantis’ primary computers to be working, pending evaluation of the latest shutdown.

After getting a little free time Thursday, the last space shuttle crew was woken up to deal with a second computer failure on Atlantis.
The astronauts switched to another of the five main computers on board, and NASA said the shuttle was in “stable condition with no concerns for the crew’s safety.” A computer had also failed on Sunday.

Space Shuttle Discovery was briefly on public display on Wednesday July 13 as she emerged from the hanger at the Kennedy Space Center where she has been undergoing processing for retirement since her final landing on the STS-133 mission.

An alarm signaling the loss of one of five General Purpose Computers that run the shuttle awakened the Atlantis crew about 90 minutes after going to sleep today, but the crew is in no danger.

On April 12, 1981, the world watched as NASA sent the first reusable space vehicle into orbit.
The space shuttle was the most complex machine ever built, launching like a rocket and landing like an airplane. It was a concept some thought would never work.

Having witnessed all the high and low moments of the space shuttle’s 30-year history, I feel like a whole period of my own life is ending with the shuttle’s final voyage.

NASA, through the Harvard-NASA Tournament Laboratory at Harvard University (a lab under contract to “study crowd sourced innovation that leads to tournaments for scientific and engineering challenges”), is sponsoring a t-shirt design competition in line with the program’s final space shuttle mission.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off at 11:20 a.m. Eastern time July 8, marking the beginning of the end for the shuttle program.
But although Atlantis’ 12-day mission will bring the shuttle era to a close, a lot of the technology developed for the program will live on in terrestrial surroundings.

The Atlantis astronauts were awakened by a master alarm Thursday when one of the shuttle’s five general purpose computers apparently failed. GPC-4 was running systems management software at the time and commander Christopher Ferguson spent about 45 minutes loading that software into general purpose computer No. 2 before going back to bed.