The Atlantic once again has a wonderful and gorgeous picture collection, this time about the history of the Space Shuttle. The picture above is the original Star Trek crew attending the first presentation of the first Shuttle, named Enterprise, in 1976.
Check out this unbelievable series of photographs of the Space Shuttle Endeavour docking with the International Space Station (ISS), taken by the Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
NASA has released unprecedented views of the International Space Station linked up with the shuttle Endeavour, as seen from a departing Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli captured the images during just a few minutes on May 23, but it took more than two weeks for the views to follow a tortuous route to the Web.
Nespoli and his two crewmates — Russia’s Dmitry Kondratyev and NASA’s Catherine “Cady” Coleman — just happened to be heading back to Earth while Endeavour and its crew were visiting the station, which set up a golden opportunity for the kinds of pictures that had never been taken before. The images show the shuttle and station from a distance of about 600 feet (200 meters), with Earth’s curving disk in the background.
Today, the Space Shuttle Discovery has departed from the International Space Station (ISS), heading home on her final mission. The Atlantis and Endeavour will retire later this year, and with that, after 30 years, the Space Shuttle program comes to an end…
Really sad, as it basically means the end to the era of manned spaceflight that started in the early 1960s. There are no real successors to the Space Shuttles, and Obama apparently thinks that the discovery of space is not very important. The ISS will be decommissioned too soon enough, and it is questionable to which extent commercial spaceflight will be a replacement. So that was that. No more manned spaceflight, in the 21st century.
This video, although really cool, therefore makes me pretty sad. It’s the voice of Captain James T. Kirk, set to the final launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Won second place in NASA’s public song contest, and was the wakeup call for the astronauts on Day 12 of the mission.
