Early Wednesday morning, the Space Shuttle *Endeavour *began its final flight. And despite the piggybacked, decidedly sub-orbital nature of the journey, this one has millions of people around the country buzzing with excitement.
Over its two decades of spaceflight, Endeavour logged 299 days in space and put almost 123 million miles on the odometer. It first flew in 1992 as the replacement for Challenger. (And no, the anglicized “Endeavour” is not a typo; the shuttle was named after Captain Cook’s research vessel, which he used to observe the 1769 transit of Venus form the South Pacific.)
Endeavour, which is bolted to the top of a tricked out 747, left Kennedy Space Center in Florida and was scheduled to fly over Stennis Space Center (a little-known NASA rocket testing facility in Mississippi) and the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans (which is best known for its assembly of the shuttle’s external tank). The trip down memory lane continues when Endeavour stops near Johnson Space Center outside of Houston, home of the shuttle program’s mission control, to spend Wednesday night.
On Thursday, the Franken-plane will depart Houston, stop for fuel in El Paso, Texas, and fly over White Sands Test Facility, the scenic back-up landing site for shuttle missions. (Only one mission needed to put down at White Sands.) Endeavour will spend the night at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert (another alternate landing site that saw 54 landings), resting up in preparation for its California close up.
On Friday morning, the shuttle has a particularly long commute, even for L.A. At 7:15 AM, it will fly over the town of Mojave (the hub for New Space ventures such as Scaled Composites and XCOR Aerospace), head north over Sacramento and San Francisco, and then take one final lap around the Los Angeles basin. As of Tuesday night, the southern California schedule included low altitude flyovers of the Getty Center, Malibu, the Griffith Observatory, Universal Studios, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and, yes, even Disneyland.
Landing at LAX Airport is slated for approximately 11 A.M. local time on Friday.
In mid-October, Endeavour will taxi from LAX to its final home at the California Science Center, which won the honor to host the shuttle in a nationwide competition. The drive, which will take two days, has sparked controversy as crews work to remove roughly 400 trees and hundreds of street lights and utility poles. (City officials say they plan to replant 1000 trees.)
But as Marty Fabrick, the man in charge of the shuttle’s move, told the L.A. Times, “It’s not a once-in-a-lifetime event. It’s a once event.” The 12-mile drive will mark the first and only time a space shuttle will crawl through the streets of Los Angeles, a slow end to an extended phase of the American space program.
