Showing posts with label Discovery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Discovery. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

The Last Flight

So ends the last flight of the space shuttle Discovery:


She just touched down at Dulles, on her way to her new home at the Air and Space Annex.  I watched the live feed - I meant to go over for to see it but time got away from me this morning.  For the first time I can remember, I regretted not being at the office in Silver Spring:  they got a good look during the fly by.

I remember not being in space.  And now it's so common that we forget when we have a crew on the space station.  When Columbia launched in 1981, it was Star Trek, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov all at once, the dreams of a kid whose sci-fi reading started with  The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet coming true.

We'll go back into space in a serious way - humans have too much of a drive to explore to retreat from that challenge for long.  I hope to see us on Mars before my dreaming ends, and I think that's a possibility.

And I'm thinking of running down on Thursday for a look - Enterprise and Discovery will be sitting nose to nose for the day.