NASA's space shuttle programme bid an emotional farewell with flypasts over Washington DC and New York.
Discovery flies past the Capitol Image: NASA |
The first of of the two flights, on 17 April, 2012, saw space shuttle Discovery carried from its working home at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on the back of a specially adapted Boeing 747. After making an historic flight around the US capital, taking in the famous landmarks as it went, the aircraft and its well travelled passenger landed at Washington's Dulles airport.
The shuttle will be offloaded and sited at its new home as a special exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Discovery was the first orbiter to be retired from the programme after serving its time as one of a fleet of the world's first re-usable spacecraft, were used to ferry astronauts back and forth to the $100bn International Space Station. In all, Discovery completed 39 missions, spent the equivalent of exactly one year in space and travelled more than 148 million miles.
After dropping Discovery off, the NASA 747 then swapped passengers, collecting Shuttle Enterprise - which had been housed at the Smithsonian - to fly to New York. Enterprise was the craft used as the test prototype for the shuttle programme, although it never launched into space. Now it will become an exhibit at the New York's Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, but not before it taking a bow with a spectacular flypast over the Big Apple's best know sights.
The remaining two Shuttles will be cared for in a museum in California and the Kennedy Space Centre Museum in Florida.