[Closed] Last ever Shuttle launch

T minus 9 mins and holding...

is it on tv in the UK?

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

And http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14076454

An emotional day for me as I worked on the first few launches. Seems like yesterday.

28 minutes

Thanks

It's on CNN.

Lovely HD feed here.
http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv

See that countdown clock they keep showing?
http://bit.ly/nAun1O

(that's me, in 2005)

thanks for the links, just switched over from the tdf

They are full of themselves aren't they!

ooo didn't know we had CNN. How nice to have news without any mention of NoTW and phone hacking.

T minus 2 mins

countdown stopped at 31seconds!

yeah, something about not getting verification that the gantry has retracted.

resuming now phew!

go!

That was cool. Why do the say T-minus..? Always wondered.

takeoff minus

T = Time

The big clock at NASA will now have a plus sign counting the time the shuttle is on its mission.

As an aside,

If you're into Shuttle stuff, I can recommend ex-astronaut Mike Mullane's "Riding Rockets" autobiography. It's nicely written and quite eye-opening.

Military operations happen on H-hour on D-day in M-month etc, presumably so you can talk about it without giving away the date every time if someone's spying. We still refer to Operation Neptune as D-day of course, but really they were the D-day landings - the landings happening on the first day of the operation which was itself a lot longer in duration. So the launch happens at T-time. 30 seconds to go is therefore T-30 seconds.

I would imagine, anyway 🙂

Penguin has it. "T" means 'time of launch' (though IIRC it actually stands for "test," not "time") so anything before is T- and anything after is T+.

Amazing sight. Certainly doesn't hang about!

Bit sad that never going to see it again.

Good luck to the crew and I wish I could be on the shuttle!

I always wanted to see a launch 🙁 Ah well, there'll probably be a replacement at some point before I die. Maybe.

[url= http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-nasa-chief-tech-decade-shuttle.html ]10 years[/url] if ya lucky.

Bought this for my boys this week

[img] [/img]

I still remember sitting through school lunch at a friend's house waiting for the first launch 30 years ago - it didn't leave on time then either.

I remember our primary school class being brought into the assembly hall, sitting cross-legged and watching the first launch on a big old TV. I must've been 7 or 8. Quite a big deal for a kid obsessed with space lego and saturn 5 rockets. Always had a hankering since to go to Cape Canaveral to see a launch.

It's still an incredible machine. The size of a 737, it'll take off like a rocket, accelerate to 18,000mph orbital speed and can return to land like an albeit very fast airliner. This just nine years after the last Apollo mission.

Thirty years on the human adventure is sadly missing from space flight. I grew up with heroes like Gagarin, Glenn, Young, Aldrin and McCandless. Now all the Americans have is hired seats on Soyuz capsules and a possible return to Saturn V era behemoths. A truly lamentable occasion.

I can remember sitting in primary school in a classroom full of drawings of the space shuttle. Sad its ending, like when they cancelled Concorde weems like humanity has taken a collective step backwards

Its exactly like concorde, a great achievement but with hindsight, completely the wrong thing at the wrong time.

The new rockets and spacecraft (HLLV, CEV, Falcon/Dragon, The Sierra Nevada shuttle and Blue Origin new shepherd) coming up in the next five years or so are going to be less cool but far more useful with the added bonus of getting us out of earth orbit and doing some manned exploration again.

And when you look at the cost of a shuttle mission is $450 million dollars it's not cheap either.

Quite a big deal for a kid obsessed with space lego and saturn 5 rockets.

You are me AICMFP.