Category: Shuttle It Be?

Shuttle It Be?  

Angelenos Leave their Homes to Video Themselves Yelling at an Airplane

By Richard Rushfield

 

Today will forever be remembered as the day the United States government parked a decommissioned space plane in the middle of our downtown.  The arrival today was advertised as “The last flight of the Space Shuttle Endeavour.”  A strong hint that they aren’t coming back to pick it up anytime soon.  So get used to life with a few hundred yards less of storage space  Angelenos!

All across the city, people got up from their laptop and walked many feet outside to see Endeavour fly over and celebrate America’s final surrender in the space race. And across the city people spoke to the space shuttle flying over their heads and recorded themselves doing so for the benefit of posterity.

Welcome to LA Endeavor.  Here is what the city looks like when it gets excited.  Remember these sounds.  You may not hear them again for a very long time:

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Shuttle It Be?  

Welcome to LA, Space Shuttle: An Endeavour Fact Sheet

By Richard Rushfield

Nothing is nobler in a city than when it agrees to take in and shelter a useless former government vehicle under our roof.  On Friday, Angelenos will line the street to welcome the poor homeless little space plane to its new home.  But while we’re still getting his room ready and cutting down trees so he can fit in our streets, there’s a few things you might want to know about the newest member of our family:

• Endeavour was America’s last space shuttle built.

• Commissioned after the Challenger disaster, it was built out of spare parts left behind

• It was named after Captain Cook’s ship, for which reason a US space shuttle has a British spelling

• After the discovery of Australia was made on the original Endeavour’s first voyage, gentleman naturalist Joseph Banks who was a passenger aboard, returned home and took all the credit around town, leaving Cook to be known in his lifetime as the man who had chauffeured Banks to the South Pacific.

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