End of an era: Space Shuttle Discovery waits on launch pad ahead of its final mission



Flight to International Space Station will be voyage No.39 for old timer

Its journey to the launch pad followed the same routine as any of its past 38 flights.

But as Space Shuttle Discovery was towed the 3.5 miles to Cape Canaveral last night there was a bittersweet, almost funereal, air to proceedings.

The old workhorse of Nasa’s fleet, this will be Discovery’s final mission before it is finally retired and becomes a museum piece.

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Lit up against the night sky, the shuttle was watched by crowds of shuttle workers and their families as it took its last ride to the pad on top of a giant transporter.

Several hundred contract employees will lose their jobs on October 1 in a continuing wave of layoffs after the shuttle programme was shelved by the Obama administration.

Nasa has only two missions remaining with Discovery due to lift off for the International Space Station on November 1.

Endeavour will follow in February to wrap up 30 years of shuttle flight.

In Discovery’s 38 flights it has completed completed 5,247 orbits, and has spent 322 days in orbit, It has also flown more flights than any of the other shuttles, including four in 1985.

It was also the shuttle which was the first to fly after the 1986 Challenger disaster and 2003 Columbia disaster.

The future of manned spaceflight is uncertain because of disagreement in Washington over where future missions should fly.

Technicians are readying the payload for space shuttle Discovery's next mission, STS-133. The flight to the International Space Station is due to deliver supplies and equipment to the orbiting laboratory complex inside the Permanent Multipurpose Module.

The PMM was modified from a multi-purpose logistics module that was built as a reusable module to haul experiment racks and other materials to and from the space station.

The module will be left behind so it can be used for microgravity experiments in fluid physics, materials science, biology and biotechnology.

Located on Merritt Island, just north of Cape Canaveral, the launch pads were originally built for the huge Apollo/Saturn V rockets that launched American astronauts on their historic journeys to the moon and back.



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Views of Discovery attached to its external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters as it waits for November 1



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Space Shuttle Discovery viewed from the sixteenth floor of the Vehicle Assembly Building , left, and workers make the final preparations before it is moved to the launch pad



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Following the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission of July 1975, the pads were modified to support space shuttle operations.

All of the shuttles are checked out and assembled in the protected environment of the Orbiter Processing Facility and the Vehicle Assembly Building, then transported by large, tracked crawlers to the launch pad for final processing and launch.

During the Apollo era, key pad service structures were mobile. For the space shuttle, two permanent service towers were installed at each pad for the first time, the fixed service structure and the rotating service structure.

● A rocket carrying classified satellite cargo has been successfully launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California's central coast.

A release from the base says the Atlas 5 rocket carrying a national security payload for the National Reconnaissance Office was launched on Monday shortly after 9pm.

No details about the satellite's orbit or capabilities were released.

The launch was a project three years in the making by Vandenberg's 30th Space Wing, the United Launch Alliance and the NRO, which oversees the nation's constellation of spy satellites.









