April 17 - Shuttle Discovery to land at Dulles

[Egz]

Getting ready to leave for the event. Not looking forward to I-95N

Edit: of course, today has to be the day people eff up and fully shut down 95N

[dubfan]

From @Astronut099 on Twitter:













From @NASA:





From @RobertPearlman

(that's Approach & Landing Test pilot Joe Engle in the flight suit):

[Jettavr666]

You guys don't even wanna know the story with Intrepid and Enterprise.

It's too depressing.

Bottom line: they're supposed to build something to cover & house it, but they are way, way behind in the planning and fund-raising so they're going to keep it somewhere else for a while (JFK? Laguardia? Can't remember...) and then move it when the facility is ready.

Problem is, one of the conditions of them getting it in the first place was that they have the facility ready to go... And it looks like Intrepid knew this all along... So a lot of people (Houston, mainly) are crying foul.

seriously, how much would a prefab steel structure over it be? They are built all the time for other stuff, its not that expensive.

[Egz]

A couple of pictures I took from today.

[dubfan]

T-38 pics from the departure leg are up, including some massively hi-res versions. They're amazing -- the sunrise lighting and colors are just spectacular in some of the pics. Some of the nicest aviation photography I've ever seen.

The first pic is actually a video from inside the T-38 of their taxi & takeoff roll.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa_jsc_photo/

[Seabird]

Problem is, one of the conditions of them getting it in the first place was that they have the facility ready to go... And it looks like Intrepid knew this all along... So a lot of people (Houston, mainly) are crying foul.

Don't get me started. We don't vote for the right people so this is part of our punishment. Anyone who says that politics didn't play into this is either naive or lying.

[Egz]

Don't get me started. We don't vote for the right people so this is part of our punishment. Anyone who says that politics didn't play into this is either naive or lying.

Well I think NY had a small advantage with the amount of international tourism it gets.

[Mike_Honcho]

Don't get me started. We don't vote for the right people so this is part of our punishment. Anyone who says that politics didn't play into this is either naive or lying.

I feel the same way about the whole politics surrounding the entire program being cancelled in general and think it's an absolute travesty that we really have no space program anymore and have to pay the Russians if we want to put men in to space.

I think about all the billions and billions of dollars that go to waste in this country every year and how much it saddens me that my children will never grow up as I did watching the very best our country had to offer going into space and pushing the boundaries of our own limitations. I know there are those like Branson and others trying to commercialize this industry but it's just not the same in my opinion.

So I wonder if these shuttles are basically just the outside shell or if they have any eletronics etc left in them?