Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Discovery rolling into storage in VAB

The orbiter Discovery is being towed into Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building this morning, looking nothing ike it did when it was getting ready for a flight.

The orbiter is being towed on its wheels, not a transporter, and has no main engines or orbital maneuvering engines or thrusters. Handles used to open and shut the payload bay doors remain in place.

The nose and tail steering thrusters are being deommissioned in New Mexico.

NASA is moving Discovery into temporary storage in the High Bay 4 for about a month, opening up a processing hangar (Orbiter Processing Facility-2) for Atlantis upon its planned July 21 return from the final shuttle mission. Later, Discovery and Endeavour will swap places.

Discovery's former hangar, OPF-3, is being prepared for non-shuttle use. Discovery is being prepared for museum display at the Smithsonian Institution, where is is scheduled to be ferried in April.

4 comments:

orozcock said...

once again another FINE example of Florida Today's lack of editing and careless grammatical choices: "deommissioned".

Brad Zeiler said...

Don't like it, don't read it.

Mark Lopa said...

That's a sad sight...the flagship of the space shuttle fleet looking like it was stripped down in a "car jacking" or something. Just sucks.

J. said...

Look's NAKED!!! So sad!! KSC employee's we care IN CT even if the US Government doesn't..THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR SERVICE!!!

John_N1IWT

We'll be here for the Landing of Atlantis!!