The Necrology of the Space Shuttle Discovery
After 27 years of service, the Space Shuttle Discovery made its final historic landing at Kennedy Spacecenter in Florida on the 9th of March 2011. The Discovery was born in the same year as I. In all of its years, it has been much more productive than me. The Final Fight of the Discovery, codenamed STS-133 carried the PMM, ELC-4 and Robonaut 2 to the International Space Station.
Discovery was NASA’s third space shuttle orbiter. The construction of the Discovery, or the OV-103 in space-jargon (Orbiter Vehicle 103), was completed after four years in October 1983 in Palmdale, California. When first flown in the subsequent year, Discovery became the third operational orbiter, and up until its resignation, was the oldest orbiter in service.
It was named after two historic, Earth-bound exploring ships of the past. One was a vessel used by Henry Hudson in the early 1600s to explore the Hudson Bay and search for a northwest passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The other was one of two ships used by the British explorer James Cook in the 1770s. Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific led to the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands. Another of his ships was the Endeavour, the namesake of NASA’s newest shuttle.
It will be the first shuttle to retire from NASA’s fleet. The Space Shuttle Atlantis and the Endeavour are the last two operational shuttles left in Nasa’s fleet. When they retire, Nasa will have to borrow a space shuttle from the Russian Soyuz Program. If the cold war, espionage or James Bond movies are any indication of the political relationship between the U.S. and Russia, NASA will soon open a tender for a new Space Shuttle design. I anxiously await the next generation of space flight.
