
Live coverage of the last Shuttle launch (STS-135, Atlantis) - whiskers
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv
======
jgrahamc
It's sad to see the Shuttle go without a replacement. And to jog my own memory
of the day I saw the shuttle in the UK, here's a set of pictures from the day
Enterprise visited Stansted Airport in the UK:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike_ward/sets/7215760339467228...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike_ward/sets/72157603394672289/)

I was there as a boy standing against the wire fence with my father to see
this amazing machine. Bloody marvellous!

~~~
OstiaAntica
The Shuttle program is coming to a hard stop because the program was a
failure. The Shuttle is monstrously complex, killed astronauts on routine low
orbit missions, and its runaway costs enveloped NASA's budget, crowding out
any alternative manned platforms. There is no next-generation Shuttle or
iteration of the Shuttle because simply running the current version of the
Shuttle consumed NASA.

After this last mission, the U.S. manned space program's capabilities will be
back in the 1950s.

~~~
jordan0day
While I have to agree with your overall point, I'm not ready to cede that the
shuttle hurt manned space exploration more than it helped. Despite its'
shortcomings, the Space Shuttle has been a point of national (and I would
imagine international) pride, it's an incredible machine that has inspired the
dreams of millions.

Perhaps it _did_ hurt more than it helped, in that it made the phrase you use,
"routine low orbit missions" _not_ sound ludicrous. Perhaps it was all just a
massively expensive house of cards one gentle breeze away from failure, and on
the occasions it did fail, people were surprised. We've only been sending
people to space for fifty years, there's still nothing "routine" about low
earth orbit, and every astronaut that has died in a shuttle knew exactly the
risks they were taking.

My greatest hope is that the retirement of the remaining shuttles won't be
seen by Americans (and the world in general) as a failure or a "sign of the
times", but will be a rallying point. It's time to move on to bigger and
better things.

~~~
tsotha
_We've only been sending people to space for fifty years, there's still
nothing "routine" about low earth orbit..._

That is the damaging legacy of STS. It's established the expectation that
going to orbit can never be done at a reasonable price, that there will never
be anything people can do in space worth the staggering cost of getting them
there.

Getting to orbit _could_ be routine, but we been marinating in expensive
failure for so long the engineering that needs to be done to make it happen
will never get public support in the US.

~~~
jerf
Well, that's arguably one of the defining features of capitalism; the
engineering doesn't _need_ public support in the US. It just needs some
investors with vision and eventual profitability. The way other socioeconomic
systems tend to destroy that feature in passing (on their way to some other
goal) is one of the major reasons they have been such overwhelming failures in
practice.

The last flight of the shuttle is a huge step in the right direction,
historically so, not a regression. I respect it for what it did, but the best
thing it could do now is retire with honor and dignity.

~~~
tsotha
_...the engineering doesn't need public support in the US. It just needs some
investors with vision and eventual profitability._

Where is that profit going to come from? Space tourism? I will be very
surprised if there will be a big ongoing demand for spending a few days
vomiting in an orbiting can.

~~~
jerf
"Where is that profit going to come from?"

From providing services that are already being paid for, only for lower costs?
Which generally has the effect of growing the economy in question?

You _are_ aware that there _already is_ a space industry, right? Private
companies paying real money to put real satellites up for various reasons? It
doesn't take much Microeconomics 101 to think that dropping the cost to launch
by a factor of four will tend to grow the already-existing economy. Skepticism
about whether a viable space economy can exist at all is too late, that ship
has sailed.

Cheaper space access will enable more economic activity in existing domains,
will enable new types of activities that aren't currently viable, and
historically speaking, it's pretty safe to say that trying to guess in advance
what will ultimately be the "killer app" is actually pretty hard, but given
the existence of an already-viable economy it's more a matter of waiting and
seeing than hoping.

~~~
tsotha
Oh, there's definitely money in launching satellites. But that market is
already served by commercial companies. What we're talking about here is
_manned_ flights to orbit.

------
Cherian_Abraham
4 among us today, in an aging vessel slipped the surly bonds of earth, and
with outstretched hands touched the face of God.

\- Borrowing from Peggy Noonan, Aaron Sorkin & John Magee

------
hugh3
It's strange to think that in fifty years of manned spaceflight, NASA has only
ever built four types of spaceship: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle. The
Shuttle had a good run. It was both technically awesome and in many ways
ridiculous and pointless. Anyway, time for the future now.

~~~
fhars
It was a horrible failure. It was projected for 75 launches a year at about
25M$ (thats million dollars, not a software company in Seattle) per lauch from
1977 until the late eighties when it was scheduled to be replaced by something
better. Instead it was 135 launches in 30 years at 1.6G$ per lauch, and it
totally crippled NASA's capabilities to develop a replacement.

~~~
sukuriant
you may want to change G to B. In the United States, where dollars are used, G
is more likely to mean "Grand", or 1k. B would be billion. Or, when all else
fails, just type it out.

~~~
TeMPOraL
He probably meant "giga".

Things like kUSD or M$ appear to have come from science - it's putting an SI
prefix to a unit. Personally, when I write M$, I mean one megadollar, not 1
milion dollars.

~~~
sukuriant
That's fantastic; however, that's not how the general public writes it

~~~
TeMPOraL
You don't write M$ or G$ to general public at all.

~~~
sukuriant
Agreed. Though we do sometimes write $5M, which is functionally equivalent.
I've noticed in internet communication, it's common to say a numeral before
the dollar sign. For example, "You're going to end up spending 100$ on that".

~~~
TeMPOraL
In this case it is, but it isn't in others (like kUSD or G$).

Oh, I always thought that you write a numeral before the dollar sign... Thanks
for pointing that out. It differs between currencies - for example, british
pounds are written before numeral (£42), but polish złoty are written after
(42zł).

------
TeMPOraL
They did it! Congratulations to Atlantis crew, NASA, and everyone involved.
Maybe the Space Shuttle program wasn't exactly cost-effective and had it
failures, but it sure sparked imagination of many, me included.

------
ender7
Being able to watch a live video feed of the launch is pretty amazing.
Previously, TV coverage (if it existed at all) was terrible. This makes me
wonder what the fate of NASA would have been if the past few generations had
grown up with access to this kind of coverage. I'd like to think that NASA
would have had a lot more support than they currently do.

~~~
owenmarshall
Nearly 10% of the earth watched the lunar landing. But IMO the problem is that
the "space race" was initiated & presented -- well, as a race! The goal was to
beat the Russians, and once we did, interest waned.

The most depressing realization comes from comparing our actions between the
Apollo days & now. As a response to Sputnik, this country managed to go from
an insignificant investment in space to putting a man on the moon, and we did
it in just over a decade.

Today? We don't seem to pay attention to these challenges.

~~~
rbanffy
You can still present the space race as a race. Landing on the Moon is the
first lap. If a goal for the second lap existed - like a permanent moonbase or
something like it, it could have continued.

As marvelous as the shuttles are, they are just an expensive way to go knee
deep in space. LEO is boring because we already went much further. Let's set
foot on the Moon once again, and launch from there (using local materials is a
good excuse) to Mars and the outer planets.

Imagine how big a telescope could be with the lower gravity and how crisp its
image with no atmosphere to disturb it or absorb parts of the spectrum. Or a
radio telescope shielded (by the Moon) from Earth's radio emissions. And, if
something broke, someone would dress up and drive there to take a look instead
of taking a year of planning and a billion-dollar mission to, maybe, fix it.

------
chippy
View it in VLC Media > Open Network Stream > Address
<http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1368163>

~~~
spydum
just fyi, at least for me, Yahoo stream is about 20 seconds behind.

------
brudgers
In 1979, I watched the Enterprise+transporter fly in to Kennedy for the first
time from the Indian River - that was a long time ago. Hell, it's even been 25
years since I turned on the TV to see Dan Rather using a model to explain the
various external tanks and knew something bad had happened.

So while it is the passing of an era, with the ISS at the sharp point of
manned space flight, I'm not about to let nostalgia cloud the objective fact
that it doesn't matter whose hardware gets us off the ground and out toward
the stars.

[edit] But that's not to imply that shuttle launches aren't really cool.

~~~
lhnn
> it doesn't matter whose hardware gets us off the ground and out toward the
> stars.

On this, I disagree. Flying in an even older device (Soyuz) provided at a
ridiculous rate from a "business partner" (calling Russia an ally is not quite
accurate) is not the way we should be letting ourselves get into space.

I know the shuttle is far from perfect, but we should have had the Dragon or
Orion capsule ready before shuttle retirement.

Turn off some air conditioners and get out of a few wars, and we could have
easily kept going strong.

~~~
ugh
At least Soyuz is more reliable than the Space Shuttle.

~~~
chrisjsmith
As far as we know. The Russians weren't always that honest about who they blew
up by accident.

~~~
ugh
Aha, and what’s your evidence for that?

Soyuz 1 (1967) and Soyuz 11 (1971) both ended with fatalities. Four cosmonauts
died. The Soviet Union did not hide those fatalities. Here is what best
illustrates that: All their names are on the Fallen Astronaut memorial on the
Moon, put there during Apollo 15, only a month after Soyuz 11 ended in
disaster.

There have been no fatalities on Soyuz flights since Soyuz 11, all fatalities
occurred early on. That’s forty years without fatalities, and that’s mostly
why Soyuz is so safe and reliable.

Sure, more astronauts died during Space Shuttle missions but the Space Shuttle
also brought many more astronauts into space than Soyuz. If you look at the
percentage of fatalities Soyuz is only doing marginally better – one more dead
cosmonaut and the percentages would be about the same. It’s not so much the
raw numbers, it’s the forty years. Soyuz is a mature spacecraft, all the kinks
have been worked out, the Space Shuttle was always too complicated to ever
really work out the kinks, to ever really be considered safe.

------
jasonkester
There's no timer on the feed, but at the moment they appear to be vacuuming.
I'll take that as a sign that it's not going to launch in the next hour.

Anybody have an actual time when that's supposed to happen?

~~~
whiskers
It's due to be around 4:30pm GMT

(edited to correct the time, I was out by an hour)

~~~
mseebach
No, it's 3:30pm GMT. It's 4:30pm BST aka. London time. GMT _is not_ whatever
the time is in London.

~~~
whiskers
I'm an idiot.

------
knarf55
It's sad to see that we are retiring the US Shuttle program. In a recent
article in the Economist about how the space race is now dead, the US is now
are reliant on other countries to send folks up into space or the ISS ... even
though they are planning on retiring the ISS in 2020.

I'm hoping that the privatization of the space programs (like SpaceX or Virgin
Galatic) gets enough interest to fuel more funding and research into space
travel though only a handful of rich folks could ever pay for a ride in one of
those programs ...

~~~
rbanffy
SpaceX can, sort of, already deliver people and cargo to the ISS. And the
Dragon looks more spacious than a Soyuz.

The shuttle, cool as it is, is a money drain. All but one of its mission
profiles can be fulfilled by cheaper vehicles.

------
Killah911
Just saw it from Cape Canaveral. Quite an extraordinary feeling to watch and
feel the very last shuttle take off. What makes it even better is that there
was only a 30% chance that the shuttle would take off due to the weather. In
my mind I'd written it off, being an entrepreneur, I should've known better
than to do that :-P

------
127001brewer
This was an amazing, historical moment of our time. I even ran outside to grab
my two-year-old son so he could watch it on TV with me. (Although he doesn't
understand the significance, he keep saying "Space ship, daddy! Space ship!")

Hopefully, mankind will continue the exploration of space...

------
seles
Thank goodness for HN, wouldn't have wanted to miss that.

------
dsmithn
Congratulations to NASA for the successful launch.

Time to focus on our next space endeavors.

------
teoruiz
There is a bigger version of the video here:

<http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/135_splash/index.html>

~~~
nicolasp
Alternative: <http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv> (parent's link doesn't work for
me).

------
evilswan
Anyone else see that plain text ASCII character randomly appear on the in-
cockpit views?

------
jbri
It's somewhat sad to see the shuttles go, especially without a replacement
immediately to hand. Though hopefully the end up the shuttle program will pave
the way for a manned launch vehicle that can get us out of LEO.

------
Splines
I find the Nasa stream is timing out. The UStream one is more stable for me:

<http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ustream.html>

------
delinquentme
<http://twitter.com/#!/NASA/status/89341036589101059>

"The countdown has entered a 45-minute hold at T-9 minutes."

------
sung1
This is so sad. Are we betting on SpaceX to get us back into space now?

~~~
jordan0day
There's no betting going on at all. We're using the Russians (Soyuz) for now,
and for the foreseeable future. Private firms like SpaceX or another NASA
vehicle are a possibility, but neither of those options has been proven out at
all, and certainly will not be ready for at least several years.

~~~
ramidarigaz
Not exactly correct. Spacex hopes to do the first resupply mission to the
station before the end of the year.

<http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php>

~~~
jordan0day
You're absolutely right. I probably should have qualified my statement as
referring to manned exploration. (Sung1's comment did say "get us back into
space"... I assumed the "us" referred to humans).

~~~
ak217
Elon Musk (SpaceX) has stated that he will not be satisfied until they get a
fully reusable launch vehicle, and that he aims to go for a Mars mission.

Given SpaceX's record, it might happen sooner than you think.

<http://www.spacex.com/updates.php>
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/01/elon-
musk-s...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/01/elon-musk-spacex-
rocket-mars)

------
lgeek
Is there a stream which doesn't require Flash?

~~~
ugh
<http://livestream.com/> has a stream that works on my iPad (I don't know
about other devices or computers).

------
huihe9849hjjgkg
Thanks for letting me watch this NASA. Wow.

------
delinquentme
just verified the time:

+/- 2 mins

EASTERN: 10:40 am CENTRAL: 9:40 am PACIFIC: 7:40 am

~~~
AdamTReineke
11:26am Eastern should be the correct time.

------
clobber
What will happen to the International Space Station?

~~~
ugh
The supply situation of the ISS is quite interesting.

Soyuz[1], the Russian spacecraft, will continue bringing and returning people
to and from the ISS (three each – seven is a typical Space Shuttle crew). Two
Soyuz will continue to be permanently docked to the ISS (they will, of course,
be regularly switched out whenever a new Soyuz flies to the ISS) and serve as
lifeboats for the ISS’s crew of six. They are actually the limiting factor for
the crew size – an evacuation of everyone on the ISS has to be possible at all
times.

Soyuz will be the only spacecraft that can return something to Earth after the
Shuttle retires. Since it’s designed to fly people and not cargo it’s
certainly easy to imagine that Soyuz is far from ideal for this job – forget
bringing back any big experiments.

Progress[2] is the unmanned cargo version of Soyuz. It will continue bringing
cargo to the ISS. (Two to three tons per flight. The shuttle could bring about
25 tons to low earth orbit.) It’s, just like Soyuz, a very capable and
reliable work horse. (It was the only spacecraft bringing cargo to the ISS
when the Shuttles were grounded between 2003 and 2005.)

There are two other and newer cargo spacecraft: The European Automated
Transfer Vehicle (ATV[3]) and the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV[4]). The
ATV automatically (like its name indicates) docks to the Russian part of the
ISS and can bring up more than seven tons of cargo. It can also boost the
station into a higher orbit (as is regularly necessary). The second ATV
Johannes Kepler only recently successfully finished its mission, was filled
with trash, undocked and burned up in the atmosphere.

The HTV can bring about six tons of cargo to the ISS. It has a pressurized and
an unpressurized cargo section (meaning anything that’s supposed to be
attached somewhere outside the ISS doesn’t have to go through and fit through
the airlock, it can be brought to the ISS in the unpressurized cargo section).
It has no complicated automated approach system like the ATV, it is simply
grappled by the Canadian “robot” arm (well, it’s more a crane than a robot,
really[5]) and attached to the American part of the ISS. Since it’s docking to
the American part of the station, the docking hatch is large enough to
accommodate International Standard Payload Racks[6] which are used everywhere
in the non-Russian part of the ISS. The ATV can’t bring those racks to the ISS
since it docks to the Russian part of the station (and their hatches are too
small). The HTV also only recently successfully finished its second mission
and burned up in the atmosphere.

That’s the current situation, I will leave it to someone else to explain what
the future might hold (SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, for example). Bringing
cargo back from the ISS is the only real problem, there will only be Soyuz
after the Shuttle retires.

The ISS can currently also not be extended, well, at least not the non-Russion
part. Bringing up all the modules was a job the Shuttle was perfectly suited
for. That’s no problem since the ISS is done. They actually managed to pretty
much complete it, even looking at the original plans. Heck, even the Cupola[7]
made it.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(spacecraft)>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_spacecraft>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle>

[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-II_Transfer_Vehicle>

[5] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm2>

[6]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Payload_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Payload_Rack)

[7] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupola_(ISS_module)>

