Good work by the LA Times yields ~2:40 of pure pleasure
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/e6m-5mBcuGQ” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
You’re welcome.
Chat about whatever.
Reader Interactions
56Comments
Comments are closed.
Hal
I saw this story a few days ago and let out a little squeal. If I was a kid, I think I would have shit myself seeing the shuttle that up close and personal, going down city streets.
kd bart
That was cool.
PreservedKillick
Seeing the shuttles is always cool, and always makes me so damn sad at what we’ve lost. We used to be a country that reached for the stars and now we cannot even maintain our bridges.
MaximusNYC
I’m happy that we got a shuttle here in NYC too — and I even caught a couple of glimpses of Enterprise in her hangar at JFK — but LA definitely got a better deal.
Not only did they end up with a shuttle that actually went into space, but they got that amazing trek thru the city. Our shuttle was barged over to the Intrepid, which I guess was cool if you were in a position to see it… but that’s not the same as having it pass right by your house.
Elizabelle
@PreservedKillick: Precisely. The Tea Party has brought us the Country of “Can’t Do” (and “can’t do enough for us Medicare demographic types, but you’re on your own, younger America!”).
Tom:
One of the many reasons I miss living in the Los Angeles area. I would have been out there!
Thank you, Tom.
PS: did get to see a bit of Discovery’s DC area fly-around, before it landed at Udvar-Hazy for keeps. A little kid in our neighborhood said it was “the best weekday” he ever had.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
[Video Summary] please, with all videos. Some of us can’t view these at work.
jo6pac
Thanks, very cool.
arguingwithsignposts
I really don’t understand the tingle from seeing a decommissioned piece of hardware being transported to a museum. I’ve been to museums and seen capsules and suits, etc. glad some people are getting their ZOMGs about it. At least the mars rover makes sense to get excited about.
/destroying all my geek cred
The Other Bob
It’s kinda sad. It’s like it is going off to die.
MikeJ
Now that we got rid of the moronic shuttles we should build better spaceships. What an overpriced, underperforming hunk of junk.
Tom Levenson
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): It’s a time-lapse video of the space shuttle Endeavour rolling on city streets from LAX to its display hangar in Exhibition Park (about 12 miles). The ship rolls past Randy Donuts’ great sign, almost clips a couple of house fronts, generally looks fabulous.
@arguingwithsignposts: Dude! A spaceship on city streets?
Different strokes, I guess.
Tom Levenson
@MikeJ: Wow.
Tough room.
Parrot
Buckminster Fuller has been spotted on aisle 9 explaining things about space … we are all astronauts
RosiesDad
That was great, Tom. Thanks.
Hal
If Toyota doesn’t use this in a commercial, I’ll be shocked:
quannlace
Saw this on Rachel Maddow’s show, talking about Romney’s sparse campaigning. No events after either debates. And today, when he had a ‘scheduling conflict’ when he canceled going on The View, again no campaign events. Obama’s appearing at 4 different events. Romney, only speaking at a dinner tonight. It’s just kind of weird.
MikeJ
@Tom Levenson: It was a horrible waste of money. We could have done a lot more had we either stuck with disposable rockets (actually the shuttle wasn’t really as reusable as claimed, but NASA didn’t like to talk about it) or built the original, much smaller shuttle and not required the (never actually used) direct to polar orbit launch profile that DOD demanded. Shuttle flights were cripplingly expensive. It cost $60,000 per kg to launch something on the shuttle rather than the budgeted $18,000. It costs the Russians $5,000/kg. Imagine how much more we could have done if we had thrown money down that rathole.
amk
Cool eye candy. Thanks Tom.
Punchy
Obama only up 1 in Ohio. Get your shit together, Toledo.
rlrr
@MikeJ:
If the USA was serious about manned spaceflight, the Apollo/Saturn program would never have been abandoned. A hand full of Saturn V launches could have put into orbit the components of a space station that would have dwarfed the current ISS.
raven
@MikeJ: If a bullfrog. . .
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
Shuttle retirement is sad. It was anything but a ‘piece of junk.’ Nobody had built a fixed-wing, semi-reusable spacecraft before, and with 1970s technology at that.
But to be brutally honest, the program was so expensive that is sucked the (proverbial) air out of almost everything else in manned space.
I was a little depressed at how little coverage or mention the SpaceX success got. That was really a BFD (including how it handled the failure of one of its engines, exactly as designed).
maya
Nice vid trippin’ through LA. However, 400 trees had to be cut down along the route to make it possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzKFjaFrrck&feature=related Go Green!
Face
Wow, lots of shuttle haters on the blog.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@arguingwithsignposts: The transportation tech to get the shuttle through the city streets is kind of wow.
Hal
@Punchy:
In one day polling for Thursday via Rasmussen, who has pretty much shown a 1 point difference between candidates for months.
Just One More Canuck
@Punchy: Get a grip – it’s a Rasmussen poll
rlrr
@Just One More Canuck:
The fact it even shows Obama leading should be considered good news.
Southern Beale
I’m sorry but this Binders Full Of Women thing is just too much fun. Now Amazon is getting flooded with hilarious faux-reviews of binders and some of them are quite awesome.
Spatula
Yeah, don’t get the ZOMGasms over this, but it’s America so nuff said.
Brachiator
@arguingwithsignposts:
Southern California is still a bit the capital of car culture. And so, there is something ineffably cool about seeing the Endeavour low riding down Crenshaw Blvd and other streets.
And putting that bad boy (or girl) onto the Martian surface was engineered in Southern California, too. Just up the road a piece at JPL.
We’re gonna ride it till
We just can’t ride it no more
Brachiator
@arguingwithsignposts:
Southern California is still a bit the capital of car culture. And so, there is something ineffably cool about seeing the Endeavour low riding down Crenshaw Blvd and other streets.
And putting that bad boy (or girl) onto the Martian surface was engineered in Southern California, too. Just up the road a piece at JPL.
We’re gonna ride it till
We just can’t ride it no more
Xecky Gilchrist
Hey! You can’t park that thing here!
ET
I got a little teary eyed.
I hope the NASA people see this. If for no other reason that the weird visual of that behemoth being driven though the streets of LA and parking near Randy’s doughnut for a bit. Also, all to see the people who are excited about an up close and personal (almost touching in some cases) with it.
peorgietirebiter
Randy’s Donuts must hold some kind of record in the mom & pop category for free product placement. Yet I can’t rememeber ever hearing anything about the quality of their donuts. Maybe location fees keep them in the black. Anyway, I would have loved to have been there, almost as cool as seeing the Spruce Goose travel to Long Beach back in the day.
peorgietirebiter
@Brachiator: almost as good as rollin’ down Imperial Hwy with a big nasty redhead by your side…
SFAW
Tom –
Screw the naysayers, that was a cool video. My favorite part was it passing about a foot from someone’s wall, them watching it pass by.
I was looking for the transport’s wheels articulating, so that the shuttle could scooch past light poles and such (to all the haters: “scooch” is a legit tech term), but couldn’t spot anything. Will need to watch again, see if I can spot the actual deal.
But, anyway, it was a great vid. You know, with all the geek stuff you talk about and post, you should consider applying to MIT. I hear they like geeks there.
They’re not real big on artwork, though, so you might have to dial it back a bit on that stuff. Architecture, yes, but artwork – unless it’s generated by a robot as part of the 2.70 contest (or 2.007 for the youngsters) – is RIGHT OUT.
SFAW
@Xecky Gilchrist:
Impersonating John McCain, are we?
Uncle Ebeneezer
Thanks for the cool video. It flew over a week or so ago and that was pretty cool. I have long out-grown my boyhood fascination with planes and space-craft, but to go outside and look up out of my parking lot and see the shuttle flying by right over the foothills looking so close you could almost touch it, was pretty neat.
This must be the year of large objects being carried on the LA streets.
@Sister Rail: check out the engineering for that feat…pretty cool.
canuckistani
Very cool. The shot taken outside someone’s upstairs window with the shuttle passing by on the street below made me think of Yellow Submarine… the scene where everytime someone shut one of the doors in the hallway, all the other doors would open and all kind of bizarre shit would zip back and forth between them?
rikyrah
when I saw the pics online – I thought this was so cool
Amanda in the South Bay
I’ll admit, I was laughing at the absurdity of seeing the shuttle zoom down city streets.
Sarah
You know they cut down hundreds of mature trees to move that thing through the streets of LA. Not worth it, if you ask me.
J.
The video was taken down on YouTube but you can see it here, on the L.A. Times site.
Stuart
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields were glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
[. . .]
To an Athlete Dying Young
A. E. Housman (1859-1936)
Haydnseek
@Face: Not really haters, exactly, but people who follow the space program closely and hate to see hard-won funding used in a way that wasn’t ever remotely close to being cost effective.
Robert Sneddon
@MikeJ: Acksherly no.
The disintegrating totem poles of yore were great at putting men OR equipment in orbit; what they couldn’t do was put a cargo truck with passengers plus workshop in orbit in one piece which is what the Shuttle did, over a hundred times. The reason for the mighty Saturn V was that folks back then didn’t know how to assemble stuff in orbit and launch to a predictable schedule to make rendezvous. The original Von Braun plan to get to the moon was to build a small space station in orbit, launch crews and modules separately, assemble them at the station and then set off to the Moon while the next expedition team got ready for their own flight to orbit. When it became a race thanks in part to JFK’s big mouth they abandoned the incremental construction of a sustainable man-in-space operation for the boots-and-banners publicity stunt of Apollo. After the third or fourth Apollo flight the popular interest died away as did the funding dollars.
There is no reason to fly manned space missions now except to go to the ISS, or in the Chinese case to their own small space station module. Going back to the Moon? BTDT got the Moon rocks. Go to Mars? A single-stack system the size of the Saturn V is nowhere near big enough to launch all the hardware needed for a manned Mars mission. Then again we don’t need that one-shot launcher to actually do that sort of mission since we’ve acquired a lot of practice assembling and maintaining stuff in orbit. The ISS masses 400 tonnes and no single piece of it was bigger than 20 tonnes when it was lofted. There’s plenty of launch capability up to that size available today off-the-shelf, from Dragon X up through the Delta 4 Heavy and that’s limiting yourself to only US-based capability. There’s also Ariane, Soyuz, the Japanese H-2 etc. all of which could put the required hardware for a manned Mars mission into orbit ready for the crews to join them later. All it would take is money, and there’s the stumbling block.
Uncle Cosmo
@MikeJ: Sad to say, I must agree. But let’s not get into things like how much the design was fucked by the DoD’s insistence it be maneuverable enough in descent to never have to emergency-land on a less-than-secure airstrip…then barely used the bastard.
And by the way, fuck the X-Prize too as a total joke. The notion that a parabolic flight to 100 km is “space travel” only exists because the Air Force wanted X-15 pilots to qualify as “astronauts.” Reentry at 1 kps from that height is childsplay compared to deorbiting from 8 times faster and half again as high.
What we need is for someone to offer a Y0 Prize (“Y-nought”–get it?) for the first group to build a spacecraft carrying (say) 3 passengers that is launched (using an expedable LV if necessary*) into an Earth orbit with perigee of (say) >150 km with 3 passengers, completes (say) 3 orbits, lands its passengers safely, and does it (say) 2 more times within 30 days carrying the same passengers (IOW no one is injured badly enough not to be able to fly again) while replacing not more than (say) 5% of the heat shield after each flight. That would be an accomplishment worth paying for–I’d capitalize the Y0 Prize at $500M minimum–because it would throw the door to space wide open. (* Reusable launch vehicle would be an afterthought–easy pickin’s compared to the vehicle itself.)
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Uncle Cosmo:
There is already such a program. It’s called COTS.
At their current rate of development, you’ll see a manned SpaceX capsule before the end of this decade.
There are other contenders currently being funded, also. (I’d add more links but seem to recall FYWP chokes on more than two).
SBJules
I used to work across the street from where Endeavour was docked after landing at kept until it went back to Florida. All of California got to see it on the way to L.A. Very, very cool. I do want to go to the space Museum.
Uncle Cosmo
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Sorry, not what I’m talking about at all. Ablative heat shielding burns off during reentry. A vehicle that has to have a significant amount of lost shielding material restored (or an entirely new heat shield bolted on) after each flight is not “reusable” by my definition. A Space-Shmatte-style ceramic heat shield system would work if you could build one that didn’t take a month or more & an army of support personnel to inspect & repair between flights.
COTS is a good approach for current exoatmospheric operations but so long as you’re burning up heat shields to get back down you don’t have a sustainable operation IMHO.
Uncle Cosmo
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Sorry, not what I’m talking about at all. Ablative heat shielding burns off during reentry. A vehicle that has to have a significant amount of lost shielding material restored (or an entirely new heat shield bolted on) after each flight is not “reusable” by my definition. A Space-Shmatte-style ceramic heat shield system would work if you could build one that didn’t take a month or more & an army of support personnel to inspect & repair between flights.
COTS is a good approach for current exoatmospheric operations but so long as you’re burning up heat shields to get back down you don’t have a sustainable operation IMHO.
Maude
I follow Mars Rover Curiosity. I asked a question a couple of weeks ago and got a reply tweet.
This is tech at it’s best. Oppy (Mars Rover Opportunity)and Curiosity are discovering new rocks on Mars.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Uncle Cosmo:
Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser will have shielding (or “Thermal Protection System”, as the lingo would have it) based upon lessons learned from the Shuttle (a lot of Shuttle veterans now work for Sierra).
As far as ablative shielding goes, there’s nothing rong with it, if you make it a consumable that you replace after every re-entry. (Think of your car’s tires: You replace them every 40-80,000 miles, but that doesn’t mean your car isn’t “re-usable”). I believe that this is the approach SpaceX takes with their Dragon capsule.
Robert Sneddon
@Uncle Cosmo: Low-maintenance thermal protection for a re-entry vehicle using titanium alloy surfaces plus active cooling systems is not an insoluble problem nowadays. Sadly it won’t work on “plummet” capsules like SpaceX’s designs as they come in too fast and have to dump their kinetic energy in a very short period. The Ti-alloy systems would work on spaceplane designs as they can glide rather than plummet, spreading the heat-shedding and velocity loss over a much longer re-entry path than a simple capsule.
The Shuttle’s tiles were overspecced for their regular re-entries because of the DoD’s insistence on the Shuttle airframe being capable of the infamous (and never flown) up-and-down polar flight out of Vandenberg. In that case it had to be able to shed heat like a regular capsule due to the shortened re-entry path so it was built with tiles. Shuttles routinely returned from orbit missing several tiles and with damage to others; the loss of the Columbia on re-entry was due to major damage in one large area of the wind during takeoff.
dance around in your bones
@J.:
hey, thanks for that, because when I clicked on the original link I only got ‘this video has been removed’ bla bla bla.
Anybody else think the front image of the space shuttle looked like a grumpy dog?
ETA: My husband and I used to go out regularly at night and watch the ISS fly across the sky. Watching it in the early morning was especially spectacular, all lit up like a UFO. Sometimes we’d see both the shuttle AND the ISS one right after the other. I don’t care if the money wasn’t worth it – I’d rather see our tax dollars spent on this kind of stuff than the endless useless wars.