endeavour

SAUSALITO, Calif. -- With thousands of fans looking on from around the San Francisco Bay, the space shuttle Endeavour soared over the Golden Gate Bridge this morning en route to its final home in Los Angeles.

After taking off a little after 8 a.m. PT from the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in southern California's Mojave Desert, and piggybacked on top of a specially-outfitted Boeing 747, Endeavour made its way north to Sacramento and then turned west toward San Francisco. The journey was a farewell tour for what was called the "Baby" space shuttle, a replacement for the ill-fated Challenger, which exploded after liftoff in 1986. Endeavour made 25 launches during its lifetime, the first in 1992, the last in May 2011. … Read more

COCOA BEACH, Fla.--Bolted to the back of a 747 jumbo jet, the space shuttle Endeavour took off on its final voyage this morning, a "bittersweet" valedictory tour highlighted by low-altitude passes over NASA field centers, towns and cities along the way to museum duty in Los Angeles, giving the public one last chance to see the winged spaceplane in flight.

Running two days late because of stormy weather along the Gulf Coast, the NASA 747 and its 78-ton payload lifted off the Kennedy Space Center's 3-mile-long shuttle runway at 7:22 a.m. ET, following a … Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--The space shuttle Endeavour, veteran of 25 trips to orbit since its maiden launch two decades ago, was prepped today for takeoff on its final flight tomorrow, a cross-country tour atop a NASA 747 transport jet that will give the public one last chance to see the iconic spaceplane in flight before landing in Los Angeles Friday for work to ready the ship for museum duty.

Running two days late because of stormy weather along the Gulf Coast, Endeavour and its carrier jet are scheduled for takeoff from the Kennedy Space Center's 3-mile-long shuttle runway … Read more

NASA has just released some fascinating and mesmerizing footage shot by cameras attached to the booster rockets that lifted space shuttle Endeavour into orbit earlier this month.

Of course, there's been a lot of amazing film from space over the years (some of which I've recently encountered for the first time, thanks to a Netflix stream of a Discovery Channel documentary I missed when it originally aired).

There's Ed White's stunning spacewalk, the first-ever by an American. And the strangely moving footage shot from the Eagle as it lifted off from the moon to carry Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin back to the Columbia command module, which in turn would carry them and Michael Collins back home to Earth. In that last sequence, we see the American flag blasted by exhaust from the Eagle's ascent engine and shuddering crazily as it's left behind. (You can catch glimpses of both White's spacewalk and the Eagle's moon departure here--the former at 0:26; the latter at 0:31.)

In comparison to much of the known imagery, this newly released footage is rather mundane: No lone humans tottering vulnerably about in space, impossibly far from their home planet; no state symbols standing humbly yet grandiosely above a newly footprinted lunar surface; no tragic fireballs on liftoff or re-entry, declaring immutably the loss of all hands. And yet this footage has its own power, and it rewards the patient.

In some ways, it's reminiscent of the film that circulated on the Net awhile back of a father and son's project to send a small balloon into space equipped with an HD video camera and a GPS device. Of course, cameras attached to giant rockets that burn 11,000 pounds of fuel per second tend to leave the Earth much more quickly than do balloons. And there are a lot more fireworks to be seen as well. Still, the footage goes on and on, with the spacecraft climbing higher and higher and the clouds below growing tinier and tinier, and this helps give a powerful impression of the vastness, and loneliness, of space.

And the impression is underlined when the shuttle separates from the solid rocket boosters and their tagalong cameras, leaving them alone to tumble back down to Earth. The familiar-looking spacecraft arcs away; the roaring of the rockets dies out, leaving only silence; and the camera spins away from the blue of the oceans to face the blackness of space.

Regardless of the mundanity of much of the footage, the odd angles produced by the mounting of the cameras do make for some surprising images, and the ambient sound produces a weird effect as well. For though the sound drops out after the separation of the boosters, in some of the sections here, it reappears in a ghostly way as the boosters fall toward re-entry.… Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--The Endeavour astronauts installed a $2 billion cosmic ray detector on the International Space Station today, a powerful magnet surrounded by a complex array of sensors that will study high-energy particles from the depths of space and time to look for clues about the formation and evolution of the universe.

"Thank you very much for the great ride and safe delivery of AMS to the station," radioed Sam Ting, the Nobel laureate who has managed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer project for more than 15 years. "Your support and fantastic work have taken us … Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--With commander Mark Kelly at the controls, the shuttle Endeavour caught up with the International Space Station early today, looping under and then ahead of the lab complex before gliding back to a "silky smooth" docking at the station's forward port at 6:14 a.m. EDT.

"Houston and station, capture's confirmed," pilot Gregory Johnson radioed as the two spacecraft sailed through orbital darkness 220 miles above the south Pacific Ocean.

Inside the space station, European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli rang the ship's bell in a traditional naval … Read more

She was charged for the airline ticket, but the mid-flight viewing of a space shuttle launch was free.

Stefanie Gordon of Hoboken, N.J., woke up on Delta Air Lines flight 2285 Monday traveling from New York's LaGuardia Airport to West Palm Beach, Fla., in time to watch the space shuttle Endeavour break through some cloud cover on its way to the International Space Station.

"The captain made an announcement that we would probably see it," Gordon told CBSNews. "I really couldn't hear what he was saying, and then all of a sudden people started getting up and going over to the windows."

Gordon recorded a video (below) and took some pictures, which she then posted to her Twitter account. She wrote in a later post that she was "half asleep" the whole time.

Her pictures show Endeavour's smoke trail, with the massive shuttle appearing as small as a dot.

"It was amazing," Gordon told CBS News. … Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--Running two weeks late because of an electrical glitch, the repaired shuttle Endeavour finally blasted off and rocketed into orbit for the last time Monday, putting on a spectacular, if brief, show for the several hundred thousand spectators who were estimated to have come to watch NASA's next-to-last shuttle launch.

Carrying a $2 billion particle physics experiment, critical supplies, and spare parts bound for the International Space Station, Endeavour's three main engines flashed to life and throttled up to full power while computers monitored their performance 50 times per second.

Six-and-a-half seconds later, at … Read more

NASA said today that it has decided to push back the final launch of the space shuttle Endeavour until at least May 16. This is the third delay since the shuttle's April 29 launch was scrubbed due to problems with its hydraulic systems.

In a release, NASA said that Endeavour will launch no earlier than May 16. After the April 29 scrubbing, the agency targeted May 2, then May 8, and now mid-May at the earliest. NASA managers have got to be worried that each subsequent delay is threatening the space shuttle program's last-ever launch, that of Atlantis, … Read more