This morning, the Space Shuttle Orbiter Discovery took one last flight. Mated on top of a specially-adapted 747, it flew from Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Dulles airport just west of Washington DC. My brother-in-law works in DC and got this phenomenal shot of it:
Discovery's ultimate destination is the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center, an annex outside of DC. It will be put on display for people to see, which is nice, if bittersweet. I have mixed emotions about all this. Discovery is special to me; it was the only Shuttle I saw launch live, in 1997, when it carried a camera I helped build up to Hubble Space Telescope. And of course, for decades the Shuttles were the main rocket fleet of NASA. But they were expensive, and had a host of other problems (I enumerate many in an article I wrote for the NY ...
