299-“Welcome Back!” Discovery Lands Safely at Kennedy
Space shuttle Discovery lands, ends flying career. Even after shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis make their final voyages in the coming months, Discovery will still hold the all-time record with 39 missions, 148 million miles, 5,830 orbits of Earth, and 365 days spent in space. All that was achieved in under 27 years. Discovery now leads the way to retirement as NASA winds down the 30-year shuttle program in favor of interplanetary travel.
Space shuttle Discovery and seven astronauts ended a two-week journey of more than 6.2 million miles with a Tuesday morning landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Returning to Earth aboard the orbiter were STS-131 Commander Alan Poindexter, Pilot Jim Dutton, and Mission Specialists Stephanie Wilson, Rick Mastracchio, Clay Anderson, Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger and Naoko Yamazaki of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The STS-131 mission to the International Space Station included three spacewalks, the installation of equipment outside the ISS, and the transfer of thousands of pounds of cargo and supplies from the orbiter’s payload bay to various locations on the station.
The trailblazing prototype for the space shuttle fleet, the Enterprise, was hauled Friday atop a modified Boeing 747 to New York City where it will become a new exhibit aboard the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, a vintage aircraft carrier turned museum anchored in the Hudson River.
Now perched atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, Discovery emerged from the crane gantry this morning to spend the final day at the place she called home for three decades.
The very same aircraft that delivered Discovery from her California manufacturing plant in Palmdale to the Kennedy Space Center in 1983 was topped by the orbiter Sunday morning to prepare for Tuesday’s ferryflight to the orbiter’s museum display site outside Washington, D.C.
Two space shuttle orbiters swapped places at the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday as NASA prepares the retired spaceships for public display in museums. The unique morning climaxed with a nose-to-nose photo opportunity with Discovery and Endeavour.
Sailing in orbit on her last mission, Discovery arrived at the International Space Station on Saturday for a week-long stay to prepare the outpost for life after the space shuttles are retired. Just hours after docking, an outdoor pallet for stockpiling spare parts was hoisted from the shuttle payload bay and delivered to the station.
The shuttle Discovery weighed anchor from the Florida spaceport and set sail on her final voyage at 4:53 p.m. EST (2153 GMT) Thursday, embarking with six astronauts for an 11-day journey to bring one last module to the International Space Station.
Space station officials are considering the possibility of staging what might be considered the ultimate photo op during Discovery’s mission to deliver critical supplies and a final U.S. module to the International Space Station. Meanwhile, NASA managers and contractors met Friday for a program-level flight readiness review for the upcoming shuttle mission.
Leaving the launch pad and rolling back to the Vehicle Assembly Building early Wednesday, the space shuttle Discovery will spend the holidays having the external tank digitally X-rayed as engineers look to prove the hypothesis that its structural cracks resulted from pent up stresses accumulated during construction and were unleashed during the strains of cryogenic fueling.
NASA shot high-definition video of the lunar eclipse in the sky over Kennedy Space Center’s launch pad 39A where the space shuttle Discovery was uncovered from the gantry during preps for rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building. We took some frame grabs from that video to create this photo gallery.
The Expedition 25 crew working aboard the International Space Station has used the outpost’s seven-windowed cupola to take amazing nighttime pictures of planet Earth. The orbital observation deck offers panoramic views for the astronaut shutterbugs to wow the public in these photos of America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
For the last time in history, the space shuttle Discovery journeyed from Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building to launch pad 39A Monday night.
Moving a major step closer to its final spaceflight before retirement, shuttle Discovery took a road trip Thursday morning from the hangar to the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center for attachment to the external fuel tank and twin solid rockets. Engineers ran into trouble Friday morning with one of the main bolts that connect the orbiter to the tank, but the problem was fixed Saturday.