Mar 26 2008
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Shuttle lands tonight
Just a quick note: The Space Shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to land tonight at 7:05 p.m. Florida time. If all goes well they’ll do a de-orbit burn just before 6:00 and land a little over an hour later. I imagine it’ll be covered on NASA TV, or you can watch it on the UStream.tv channel.
Great, hope I don’t miss it.
Just under 3 hours. I made sure that I would be home for it!
If it deorbits on orbit 248, it will fly over my house as it is landing. COOL!!!
Welcome back!!!!
This attempt waved off due to high altitude clouds.
Not particularly related to the article, but would it be possible to list the UTC time as well as the local time? It’s a pain to try and figure out what time that is where I am, particularly if all I have to go on is a location.
Cheers.
Just cleared for de-orbit burn.
De-orbit burn has been successfully completed, Endeavor is on her way home to KSC.
I have to admit that I find the stream a bit boring. 45 minutes of intermittend comments to endure to the real highlight, the LIVE pilots pov transmission of a spaceship landing.
Not too many left to catch anymore.
I wish they would transmit live the whole landing process from the shuttles cockpit.
Philip, I was just going to say exactly the same thing! A few missions ago, Atlantis flew directly over my home just north of Vancouver. I couldn’t see anything though.
Actually I’m more than disappointed that NASA is not able to provide a more exciting live report of the shuttle landing. There are so many possibilities of making the last handfull of landings a more involved experience. Doesn’t NASA want to “reach out” ?
Wouldn’t it be cool to have the controlroom screens not as blurry pictures but live to the sides of the streaming video in dedicated windows? Argh 20min of looking at people in the control room, picking their noses.
You’d think they’d let them eat pizza at least.
Although there is a babe sitting in the Control Room! Woo Hoo!
Michael,
how many I have missed I can’t tell (53degNorth) and if there was a chance, clouds were dense. And I tried.
300mls to go.
The shuttle is down and wheels stopped.
Always amazing to watch how they do that!
touchdown,
what a beautiful machine.
Nightlandings always show the APU exhaust nicely, the thing sounding like an old steam machine puffing away.
Cool IR pic on NASA TV.
I wish they would put out that fire on top. It makes me nervous.
Last night (20:00) I was able to have a magnitude -2 view of ISS here in Miami,FL. Like 20 degrees behind Endeavor was shining as -1~-2. Amazing!
Great landing. Great job.
bigjohn, it’s supposed to do that. We just can’t see it when it lands in the daytime.
I know, but flames near an aircraft always make me nervous. APUs on regular aircraft are just small jet engines which make no flames and so I don’t get so anxious.
Welcome home, Endeavour!
Watched the landing a minutes ago. It was just great!!
The only weird thing was the Auxiliary Power Unit was venting fumes, and all the chat room freaked out a little bit
I just got home from a friends house, the double sonic boom of was clearly audible here in northern Sarasota. My host jumped up thinking something had hit his house, then relaxed when I told him the shuttle was coming back.
I just happened to be at a hotel across the bay from KSC tonight, so I got to see the landing. Or rather, I got to hear the double sonic boom (holy wow, that’s an awesome sound) and then peer into the night sky trying to tell the difference between chase planes and the Orbiter.
We saw ISS go right overhead a few minutes before the Orbiter landing, though, which was nifty.
So glad for another safe/successful mission. Yay! I’ve lost track - how much closer are we to the Hubble repair?
Melusine -
Aug 28th, unless the external tanks are delayed. The tank for the next mission (May 24, the big pressurize part of Kibo) just arrived at the cape. It was late but they expect to be able to launch as scheduled. The next flight is the Hubble repair mission, but they need to have 2 tanks on hand, as a second shuttle will be standing by (on the other pad, I think) in case they need to launch a rescue mission. If the Hubble mission goes okay, they’ll just swap in one of the cargo containers and launch the 2nd shuttle to the ISS, in October. After that they plan to launch the final set of solar wings in December and the last piece of Kibo early next year.
However, this all depends on having two tanks delivered to the cape and ready to launch by August, and they are having problems getting them ready, so according to spaceflightnow.com’s web site, they expect at least some of these flights to be delayed.
Makes you wonder what would have happened if there hadn’t been that hail storm last year that delayed everything 4 months? Would they have launched Endeavor 4 months ago and would we currently be in the middle of a big hiatus waiting for today’s UPS man with the tank for May’s flight?
The factory where they build the tanks was badly damaged by Katrina, but I don’t know if that’s still a factor. Also, they are planning to build the 2nd stage of the Ares I and the 1st and 2nd stages of the Aries V at the same plant. Just sayin’.
While I didn’t see the landing on TV or any other medium, I did HEAR it.
While my housemate and I were talking, we heard the double sonic boom. It startled us, as well as our neighbor. Then we realized what the noise was.
I should’ve known, as I heard the same noise during the previous landing.
I Live In Plam Harbor FL and We heard the Double Sonic Boom of the shuttles flyover arround 8:40PM ESTVery Very cool!
JT
Watched the final touchdown live on MSNBC while watching Countdown w/Keith Olbermann. He was talking about some US Senator by the name of McCain or McBush or whatever. All I do know is that it was a pleasant surprise to watch and I wish they had mentioned that they were going to do it or even that it had come down safely.
Oh, well.
Wish they would put some external lights on the shuttle.