{"id":2195,"date":"2011-07-13T11:26:47","date_gmt":"2011-07-13T11:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=2195"},"modified":"2011-07-13T11:26:47","modified_gmt":"2011-07-13T11:26:47","slug":"a_sad_sight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2011\/07\/13\/a_sad_sight\/","title":{"rendered":"A Sad Sight&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/jasonbennion.com\/images\/space-shuttle-discovery-decommissioning-7-12-11.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"space-shuttle-discovery-decommissioning-7-12-11.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/jasonbennion.com\/assets_c\/2011\/07\/space-shuttle-discovery-decommissioning-7-12-11-thumb-500x375-47.jpg\" class=\"mt-image-center\" style=\"text-align: center; display: block; margin: 0pt auto 20px;\" height=\"375\" width=\"500\" \/><\/a> <\/p>\n<div>That&#8217;s space shuttle <i>Discovery<\/i>, now stripped of her three main engines as well as the distinctive orbital maneuvering system (OMS) pods that used to flank her vertical stabilizer. She&#8217;ll be fitted out with dummy engines before she goes on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, but for now, she&#8217;s looking pretty shabby and weirdly deformed without those pods. And I&#8217;ll be honest, the thought of her without her engines, the burning heart of a rocket ship&#8230; well, comparisons to taxidermy are not inappropriate, in my mind. You can admire the form and colors of a stuffed bird, but its vitality, the thing that made it truly beautiful, is gone forever.<\/p>\n<p>This photo, taken yesterday, shows <i>Discovery <\/i>being moved out of a hanger known in NASA-speak as Orbiter Processing Facility 2 to make room for <i>Atlantis <\/i>when she comes home next week. <i>Endeavour<\/i>, meanwhile, is in Orbiter Processing Facility 1, having her various fuel tanks drained. A few weeks from now, both she and <i>Atlantis <\/i>will look like <i>Discovery <\/i>as all three surviving orbiters undergo their decommissioning and become butterflies on a pin. <\/p>\n<p>If you haven&#8217;t heard, <i>Atlantis<\/i>&#8216; mission has been been extended by one day. She&#8217;s now scheduled to land on July 21, a week from tomorrow, at 5:56 AM Eastern. Which will be the wee dark hours here in the Mountain zone. I&#8217;m debating over trying to get up (or just stay up) to see it live&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s space shuttle Discovery, now stripped of her three main engines as well as the distinctive orbital maneuvering system (OMS) pods that used to flank her vertical stabilizer. She&#8217;ll be fitted out with dummy engines before she goes on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, but for now, she&#8217;s looking [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-final-frontier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}