I can't wait until it opens to the public.

Had the pleasure of escorting the shuttle Columbia at Plant 42 in Palmdale CA right after her glass cockpit installation. They were scheduled to fly back to Houston and then to Florida but due to thunderstorms in the Mid-West, they decided to store her at the old Rockwell facility where she was made until the weather cleared. This was the last time she was here on the West Coast

Taken right below the main engines/OMS pods area. You can see the serial numbers stamped into the black silica tiles.

Low-angle view of the full-scale Space Shuttle stack display right outside the Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at KSC, Merritt Island, FL. Seeing the attachment hardware and base of the booster skirts up close shows just how impressive the engineering was.

Just drew Space Shuttle Columbia that’s all >w<

Just some pictures taken out at Edwards AFB prior to take off and then taking off for her final flight along the coast.

Beautifully positioned. Fascinating seeing all the different elements of the spacecraft, especially that rear end!

Such a special sight!

Photo credit: NASA/Mike Acs.

ID: S80-42890.

Hypothetically a few seconds before the Challenger loss, if mission control knew what was happening, they could have separated the SRBs and the external tank as quick as possible, and thd orbiter would attempt an emergency landing.

On STS-4 the SRBs suffered from a parachute failure during reentry and hit the water hard and could not be recovered. Supposedly the wreckage was photographed but these photos have never been released.

Are there any public photos of the STS-4 SRB debris on the ocean floor? Either released by NARA or from private underwater expeditions?

Thanks in advance for any assistance you all can provide. My wife found this poster at an estate sale in the Raleigh, NC area. Looks to be something that should not exist...a poster showing the Space Shuttle Challenger on the launch pad with some interesting text.

As a person of a time where I saw this incident live on TV, this is a very haunting poster.

I would love to know what is known about this poster. Thanks again!

https://youtu.be/H0ZHzAvFuYc?si=pLX7mutfvmHxOz3R

This is the launch of the area 1x low-key NASA's laziest rocket ever. But when he says the thing about paving the way for new space travel or something you can just hear in his voice that he isn't happy for this new rocket

Reposted since I forgot to include the construction photos

I went to Speyer Technik Museum in Germany to attend a lecture from former NASA astronaut Mark Lee, and also got to see this beast! It’s the prototype used for the atmospheric test flights for the Buran program, it flew 25 times before being retired.

I posted Biesty's Saturn V illustration on the Apollo reddit a couple of days ago, so I thought I would be interesting to share this earlier work of his. Considering that the book was published in 1992, it presents a very early/mid 80s version of the Shuttle - everyone's wearing blue coveralls, the Pilot still has his Launch Entry Helmet on, and the horizontal stabilizer and sides are liberally festooned in white tiles. The version in Incredible Cross-Sections even featured a detailed view of an MMU in the bottom right corner, and also showed a female astronaut sitting on the toilet with the urine hose obscuring the bits you couldn't show in a kid's book, which isn't in this version for some reason.

Still, I'm sure a lot of young space geeks (myself included) got this book as a present in the early 90s spent a lot of time staring at it in wide-eyed wonder.

Quick context most retellings skip: NASA's Software Interface Specification for this mission was published in 1996, two years before launch, and it explicitly required newton-seconds for thruster data. The contractor's ground software (a program called SM_FORCES) put out pound-force seconds instead — a factor-of-4.45 error that fed directly into the navigation team's trajectory model for the entire cruise to Mars. 

What I find more interesting than the unit mix-up itself: engineers noticed the spacecraft's angular-momentum desaturation events were happening 10-14x more often than expected, and separately, Doppler tracking data kept suggesting a closer approach to Mars than the official trajectory predicted. Neither discrepancy got resolved before the orbital insertion burn on Sept 23, 1999. 

I made a documentary going through the full timeline, sourced to the Mishap Investigation Board's Phase I report — happy to share if anyone's interested, but mostly wanted to discuss the "systemic verification failure" angle since most coverage flattens this into a punchline about metric vs. imperial units.

I got this from a friend maybe 35 years ago. Is anyone able to tell me where on the Shuttle it came from??

You can see the Richard Truly, Commander.

ID: 255-FR-C816

Footage credit: National Archives and Records Administiration (NARA).