How old is discovery space shuttle

It was also the orbiter that carried the Hubble Space Telescope to space and completed two of the five servicing missions on the telescope.

Its final mission, STS, was February 24, , after 27 years of launches. Today, you can see Discovery at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

My Trip. Cart 0. Tickets 0. Extreme care was taken to ensure the spacecraft was preserved as it appeared after its final mission—dings, dents and all. Are you planning on cleaning it? They show the incredibly violent process of traveling through the atmosphere. For the curator, it is a wonderful experience seeing Discovery every day at the McDonnell Space Hangar.

Levasseur is thrilled to work on the exhibit and talk to visitors about the Space Shuttle program, which ended more than a decade ago. I love it that we are still selling toys shaped like Space Shuttles. What can I say? Discovery still makes me smile every time I see her. Editor's note, September 24, This story erroneously put the year of the Challenger disaster as It was David Kindy is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian.

He is also a journalist, freelance writer and book reviewer who lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts. David Kindy Daily Correspondent. Discovery was named after two sailing ships, according to NASA. One of those ships, commanded by Henry Hudson, was most famous for a voyage in to search for a waterway between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

James Cook commanded another ship called Discovery when his crew was the first European group to set foot in the Hawaiian islands in Rockwell got the contract to start building Discovery in Discovery departed its manufacturing birthplace in Palmdale, Calif. Discovery weighed in at 6, pounds less than Columbia, a product of Rockwell's experience in building two shuttles and a prototype so far Columbia, Challenger and Enterprise. In its career, Discovery also underwent two major upgrades in and for technological and safety modifications.

On June 26, , Discovery was in the final moments of launching to space on STSD when the engines shut down seconds before launch. It was the shuttle's computers that initiated the abort, which happened when a fuel valve on Engine 3 didn't open as planned. Minutes later, a hydrogen fire broke out and the pad's fire suppression system kicked in. According to crew member Mike Mullane in his memoirs Riding Rockets , the crew was a little befuddled as they watched water splashing across the windows.

They weren't sure if it was best to leave, or to escape the shuttle. After some discussions, NASA and the crew decided to stay put.

We could have thrown open the hatch and run into a fire. When it was safe to do so, the crew exited and got soaked by water from the fire suppression system.

But the important thing was that they were okay. This was the first abort of the shuttle program; all told, five shuttle missions were called off just moments before launch, then sent into space at a later date. Another mission, STSF , had an early cutoff in Challenger's center engine about five minutes, 45 seconds into the launch.

It went into orbit successfully.