I love the Space Shuttle. It’s inspirational, it’s what a spaceship should look like and I think it’s a shame that it’s nearly finished it’s work.
Space capsules stuck on the top of rockets are rubbish, going back to them is no different to knocking down all the road and rail bridges and folk being shot across the river by a trebuchet.
Thisa is a fantastic time-lapse film of Discovery being prepared and launched. Lifting it onto the fuel tank and boosters is pure magic.
Here’s to the future, the one we hoped we’d get, not the one budget cuts are going to give us.
Awesome – is it odd I had the Thunderbirds music playing in my head all the way through?
It kinda fits!
That is an brilliant we film. I love space and all that gubbins. I even saw the International Space Station 3 nights in a row a few weeks ago – got a picture and everything! It was really clear in the sky.
I was lucky enough about 10 years ago to go to Florida and go to the Kennedy Space Centre. The scale of the place is unbelievable and the VAB – vehicle assembly building, where they took the shuttle to get connected to the fuel tanks and boosters in the film, is absolutely massive!!
It was a great experience to go around it all. Even met a proper astronaut. (Excuse me but the real geek in me is coming out). The crawler they put the shuttle on to get to the launch pads actually takes a good few hours (12?) to get from the building to the launch pad it goes so slow.
Anyway, enough of the geekness, but thanks for that wee video, it’s well cool.
:o)
The future may well lie in lower budget options. Virgin’s VSS Enterprise (unusual name that) looks to me like the way forward, smaller steps mind you but still forward.
My sister saw a shuttle launch when she was out in Florida with her orchestra a few years ago. Lucky thing! I loved that the test shuttle was called USS Enterprise :-)
I saw the Enterprise test shuttle back in what, ’80/’81? They flew it into Glasgow on the back of a 747. Brilliant.
Branson’s Enterprise is going the way of the 2001 Space Odyssey shuttles, I like that.
Geeks welcome, always.
Where are the men in white lab coats and hair nets?At one point it looks like it’s in some geezers lock-up!I’ve maybe seen too many James Bond films.
Actually, that all reminds me of Waynes’s World ?!
brilliant film and even though it’s all on a huge scale I love the wee ingenious touches, like why put bigger doors on the hanger when you can just cut a slot for the tail to pass thru and when they lift it on it’s end, they turn it 45 degrees so that it has a narrower profile for moving thru the building – fantastic
The subtlety of moving something so big and expensive too, genius.