FINAL Planned Flight of Discovery

[groovyone]

NASA - Space Shuttle

Wish her well on her last voyage.

[brewercm]

Kind of a sad day for space voyage.

[groovyone]

STS-41D was Discovery's first missin: NASA - STS-41D

August 30th, 1984.

For a program that was not supposed to go this long, I consider it a well earned retirement.

[groovyone]

Range Safety is No Go right now due to a central computer issue at their control center. We'll see if they get it sorted out.

[dcopeland]

It's now a go! :) Godspeed Discovery and crew!

[groovyone]

Did anyone else see some debris zip past the ET camera? Hopefully it was nothing.

[dcopeland]

Yes, I saw that too.. but they didn't mention it on feed from nasa on the web.. Hope it was nothing as well..

[Nikonfan]

This is bittersweet for me. My original major was astrophysics and I love to keep up with what NASA is doing. I think today is a good day to reflect on the space program, all it has acomplished, it's ups and downs.

Sadly, I remember a few months before the Columbia disaster, one of my Science magazines arrived in the mail. It had a picture of the Shuttle on the cover with the headline "Why the Shuttle program is another disaster waiting to happen!" The article was written by a former NASA scientist and detailed how all the remaining shuttles were older than they had been designed for and had many flaws. He speculated that it wouldn't be long until another disaster such as the Challenger happened. Sadly, he was correct. I thought then that NASA would be done with the program. I hate to see it go, but not as much as I would hate to see a third disaster.

[slallen]

My father-in-law joined NASA just before the Mercury missions (Yes one of the original rocket scientist) He was in Mission Control or at Kennedy (even a few in California) for every mission and was on the committee that was formed after Challenger and attended the congressional review in Washington.

At the time that was going on I was able to see the reports and other documents, There were almost 1000 known catastrophic conditions, where a part could fail, and there would be no recourse. These were just the known risks. I can see why the author of that article said it was a disaster waiting to happen.

My FIL recently retired, but I can tell you it is a great pleasure just sitting and talking to him about past NASA missions and I am positive he was watching this final launch. Todays launch was a great thing to watch and remember the past missions.

[TXhummer2]

Discovery was so far up out of the atmosphere when the foam pieces drifted off the fuel tank, there is little damage done to the shuttle. Already on the news at ABC 13.

[groovyone]

My friends on console said it was written up as foam. I am sure the MMT will be looking into it very carefully for the next few days.

[Crashoran]

Anybody see the view from the airplane?
YouTube - Space Shuttle Launch: Viewed From an Airplane

[KD5NRH]

Originally Posted by groovyone

Did anyone else see some debris zip past the ET camera? Hopefully it was nothing.

It's Florida; probably just one of them tossing a beer can out the window so they don't get stopped with an open container.