Taken from NASA website
After going outside to hear the familiar "ba-BOOOM!" sound that Space Coast inhabitants have come to recognize, Discovery landed safely at the Kennedy Space Center at 1115h EDT. There were a few minor problems during the mission, which NASA engineers studied intensely before giving the go ahead.When I went to the NASA website, I saw the stats for the space shuttle and laughed a bit (especially at the very last bit):
Flying 5.7 million miles will get me SO MANY free airline tickets. Too bad the miles aren't redeemable at any airline on earth...
1 comment:
So I was just looking on Wikipedia, and I'm surprised to find out that considering Discovery is the oldest orbiter now, it has only flown 110,000,000 miles over the course of 34 flights. That's an average of around 3.2 million miles per flight.
Why was this flight almost double? Maybe because it was the second longest flight for Discovery? Even then, I thought Discovery was docked to the ISS for most of that time.
Another interesting note is that almost all of the flights from 1984 - 1993 were under 7 days long, while ever since 2000, most of the flights have been longer than 10 days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle_discovery
As much I know it is time for this shuttle fleet to be retired, I'm going to miss seeing them go. Hopefully, I'll be able to see a launch before the final retirement.
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