Discovery: STS-133

I certainly have gone on my fair share of business trips in the past year. And I really can’t complain about most of them. Spent some time in DC and California and a lot of time in England which in itself is pretty special. But I had a particularly special trip on my birthday this year. Sure, it sucks to travel for work on your birthday, but this trip had perks.

I was visiting Kennedy Space Center to talk future business with some engineers there. I was excited because I thought there was a chance I might be able to see some cool things on site like the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB - where they assemble the space shuttle stack) or maybe even see the shuttle itself at a distance. How wrong I was.

My contact there was a great guy intent on showing me all he could in a day. We did see the VAB inside and out (one of the largest buildings in the world), got to go into mission control and stand where many giants of the industry have stood before and saw lots of other Apollo era buildings, basically the foundation of my business. But the biggest treat was the shuttle itself. Discovery was on the launch stand awaiting launch after many delays. My host brought me to the launch pad itself and up on the gantry. I walked the same platforms as Glen, Shepherd, Grisson and many others. We walked under around and all over the famous spacecraft.

It was a real treat, something very few can do and most of us aerospace engineers always wish to. It is strange actually; I am not a big fan of the manned space program or the space shuttle. Mostly from a technology and budget point of view I think it is wasteful, old and largely political in nature. However, it is still a beautiful machine of such staggering size and capabilities that one can’t help but gawk at it. It is this that got me and tens of thousands of others like myself into this business.

Sitting in an office all day I forget sometimes why I got into the space industry. It is moments like these that remind me how fortunate I am. This is going to be Discovery’s last flight. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to touch it before it makes history one last time.

33 years old and a child again at the same time.

The external tank in the background

Standing near the top of the rotating segment of the launch platform. Behind me is the nose of the Discovery Orbiter. It is stacked with the tank and boosters now so you can picture it pointing upwards. I am about 200 feet up here.

Now standing beneath the shuttle. Behind me is one of the orbiter’s wings. You can see its name up above and the main engines right behind my head. If I had the camera, there would have been a 1000 more like this for everything I saw

A more obvious picture. Standing on the mobile launch pad you can see the two white boosters behind me attached to the shuttle external tank in the middle. The orbiter is on the other side attached to the tank and covered by the rotation structure that will move away before launch. This gives some sense of size, but still not enough. Everything is so big it boggles even the rocket scientist’s imagination that this thing can get into space.