http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/apr/HQ_M12-062_SCA_Discovery_Flight_DC.html
April 9, 2012
Space Shuttle Discovery to Fly Over Washington Metro Area April 17
The flight, in cooperation with the Federal Aviation Administration, is scheduled to occur between 10 and 11 a.m. EDT. NASA Television and the agency's web site will provide live coverage.
The exact route and timing of the flight depend on weather and operational constraints. However, the aircraft is expected to fly near a variety of landmarks in the metropolitan area, including the National Mall, Reagan National Airport, National Harbor and the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center. When the flyover is complete, the SCA will land at Dulles International Airport.
Discovery completed 39 missions, spent 365 days in space, orbited the Earth 5,830 times, and traveled 148,221,675 miles. NASA will transfer Discovery to the National Air and Space Museum to begin its new mission to commemorate past achievements in space and to educate and inspire future generations of explorers.
If the flight must be postponed for any reason, an additional notice will be released.
For more information about NASA's transfer of space shuttles to museums, visit:
For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:
I've long been fascinated in how our space program shriveled sometime during the early 1970s, when they spoke of a manned mission to Mars by 1982, and we had that then recent movie 2001 A Space Odyssey with a wheeled space station, moon base respectively served by routine space-plane and moon shuttle, and a manned mission towards Jupiter.
It's like there was some imposition of some rule from above that humanity's excursion into space had to be delayed- okay to research and design stuff at best okay to mothball, until something was rightened together on earth.
Would be nice to see something interesting, say in Area 51 on December 21 - 22.
Would be nice to see something interesting, say in Area 51 on December 21 - 22.
April 17, 2012
It sort of looks like some sort of esoteric message:
Ben Franklin as the Horned God
The rotating space station ship was invented by Herman Potocnik "Noordnung", a Slovenian engineer, at the beginning of XX cent. A Nasa adviser for Kubrick saw it on the cover of a SF magazine and it entered in the movie. The work of Noordnung was among the fundamental text of the works of (Nazi) von Braun :
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Poto%C4%8Dnik
".....Herman Potočnik (pseudonym Hermann Noordung; December 22, 1892 – August 27, 1929) was an Austro-Hungarian rocket engineer and pioneer of cosmonautics (astronautics) of Slovene ethnicity. He is chiefly remembered for his work addressing the long-term human habitation of space.
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Potočnik's book described geostationary satellites (first put forward by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) and discussed communication between them and the ground using radio, but fell short of the idea of using satellites for mass broadcasting and as telecommunications relays (developed by Arthur C. Clarke in his Wireless World article of 1945). The wheel-shaped space station served as an inspiration for further development by Wernher von Braun (another former VfR member) in 1952. Von Braun saw orbiting space stations as a stepping stone to travel to other planets. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick's ground-breaking film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, depicted such a role for "Space Station V"........."