shuttle

It's the one space shuttle that never made the trip to space.

And now the shuttle Enterprise is making the journey to its final frontier, the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York. It flew into JFK Airport from Washington Dulles this morning, not on its own power but latched atop NASA's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.

NASA has made an event out of the short flight. The twinned aircraft flew at a low altitude over the New York metropolitan area and passed within photo-op range of landmarks including the Statue of Liberty. It has now landed … Read more

It wasn't an everyday sight. Hitched to the back of a NASA 747 jumbo jet, the Shuttle Discovery today made its final flight, going from Florida's Kennedy Space Center to Dulles International Airport en route to its new home at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's nearby Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

NASA has released some amazing official shots of the historic happening, but we wanted to see how it looked to the thousands of space enthusiasts on the ground pointing their cameras and phones skyward in hopes of capturing the orbiter's last airborne hurrah.

The results of their photographic efforts have been pouring in to Twitter all day (hashtag #SpotTheShuttle), and onto NASA's Spot the Shuttle Flickr site. Together, they make for a stunning crowdsourced chronicle of a big day in the life of the shuttle program. Scroll through the gallery below for just a few of our favorite shots. … Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL -- The space shuttle Discovery, bolted to the back of a NASA 747 jumbo jet, departed the Kennedy Space Center for the last time today, putting on a final show for thousands of Space Coast residents and tourists who jammed area beaches just after sunrise for a low-altitude flyby.

"Oh my God," exclaimed Lynne Rover, who watched the shuttle pass overhead from a beach in Cape Canaveral. "I feel like part of America is dying. It really annoys me that we have to pay the Russians to bring our astronauts back and forth (… Read more

The anniversaries this week of the first man in space and the launch of NASA's first space shuttle missions come at time when commercial spacecraft are ushering in a new era of space flight.

Thursday was the 51st anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute orbit around the Earth, an event that shocked the world and ratcheted up the speed of the Cold War-fed space race.

And 31 years ago on April 12, the space shuttle Columbia lifted off, the inaugural flight of NASA's shuttle program which drew to a close last year.

Astronauts from different countries on the … Read more

If you had been hoping to be able to see the Space Shuttle Discovery make its last flight -- albeit on the back of a 747 -- next week but can't be in Washington, D.C., don't worry, we have you covered.

That's because the nice folks over at Technology Integration Services have created a 3D simulation of what the flyover of D.C. and landing at Dulles International will look like.

For those of you who don't know what this is about, NASA said earlier this week that it will be flying the Discovery-747 combo … Read more

One Romanian man's tribute to the end of the space shuttle era may leave you slightly misty-eyed.

His YouTube video, complete with a soul-searching ballad, shows off a Lego space shuttle reaching the stratosphere last December with the help of a 56-ounce helium-filled meteorological balloon, GoPro Hero, and a Spot GPS device. Keep an eye out for the epic frost buildup on the shuttle nose during the 114,829-foot ascent. … Read more

If you're a fan of America's long and storied history of great engineering, the National Park Service has got something for you.

On Monday, the park service's Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) Autodesk and kubit will announce the technological process of documenting these structures, a process that resulted in a broad collection of 3D imagery of projects like the Space Shuttle Discovery, as well as NASA launching pads, famous bridges, and more. The imagery was used to generate what are known as "point clouds" of data that, together, show a 3D version of the object. … Read more

Fifty years after rocketing into history as the first American in orbit, John Glenn sees America's manned space program at a perilous crossroad.

Thanks to political gridlock, an increasingly tight budget and uncertain congressional support, NASA is facing a best-case five- to six-year gap between the end of shuttle operations last year and the debut of new low-cost space taxis the Obama administration hopes will usher in a new era of commercial spaceflight.

In the meantime, U.S. astronauts have no choice but to hitch rides to the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, relying on America's … Read more

In 2011, Boeing's 787 Dreamliner carried passengers for the first time, and the space shuttle landed for the final time.

For aviation buffs and aerospace junkies, those were the signature events of the year. In the case of the shuttle, there were actually three such moments, and each time we got more verklempt: Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis all flew their final missions. But as the door closes on that 30-year piece in history, a window is opening to private space ventures like SpaceX and the newly unveiled Stratolaunch effort from Paul Allen and Burt Rutan.

Boeing got a lot … Read more