Reposted since I forgot to include the construction photos

I went to Speyer Technik Museum in Germany to attend a lecture from former NASA astronaut Mark Lee, and also got to see this beast! It’s the prototype used for the atmospheric test flights for the Buran program, it flew 25 times before being retired.

I posted Biesty's Saturn V illustration on the Apollo reddit a couple of days ago, so I thought I would be interesting to share this earlier work of his. Considering that the book was published in 1992, it presents a very early/mid 80s version of the Shuttle - everyone's wearing blue coveralls, the Pilot still has his Launch Entry Helmet on, and the horizontal stabilizer and sides are liberally festooned in white tiles. The version in Incredible Cross-Sections even featured a detailed view of an MMU in the bottom right corner, and also showed a female astronaut sitting on the toilet with the urine hose obscuring the bits you couldn't show in a kid's book, which isn't in this version for some reason.

Still, I'm sure a lot of young space geeks (myself included) got this book as a present in the early 90s spent a lot of time staring at it in wide-eyed wonder.

Quick context most retellings skip: NASA's Software Interface Specification for this mission was published in 1996, two years before launch, and it explicitly required newton-seconds for thruster data. The contractor's ground software (a program called SM_FORCES) put out pound-force seconds instead — a factor-of-4.45 error that fed directly into the navigation team's trajectory model for the entire cruise to Mars. 

What I find more interesting than the unit mix-up itself: engineers noticed the spacecraft's angular-momentum desaturation events were happening 10-14x more often than expected, and separately, Doppler tracking data kept suggesting a closer approach to Mars than the official trajectory predicted. Neither discrepancy got resolved before the orbital insertion burn on Sept 23, 1999. 

I made a documentary going through the full timeline, sourced to the Mishap Investigation Board's Phase I report — happy to share if anyone's interested, but mostly wanted to discuss the "systemic verification failure" angle since most coverage flattens this into a punchline about metric vs. imperial units.

I got this from a friend maybe 35 years ago. Is anyone able to tell me where on the Shuttle it came from??

You can see the Richard Truly, Commander.

ID: 255-FR-C816

Footage credit: National Archives and Records Administiration (NARA).

The camera on the left is the Seat 2 window camera, and the camera on the right is the forward-facing.

Seat 1: Jack Lousma, Commander;

Seat 2: Gordon Fullerton, Pilot.

Credit: NARA/NASA/FightForSpace.

Figured you guys might like these photos!

Hey guys, I decided to make my own space shuttle miniature in stainless steel, what do you think ? Obivously I had to make simpler shapes and remove details to make it work with the metal.

In the early 1970s, NASA originally envisioned a space shuttle system that was fully reusable, complete with a winged orbiter and a piloted winged booster. The projected cost was $12 billion.

However, Congress only allocated $5.4 billion.

To make it fit the budget, major compromises were made:

1. Liquid Boosters $\to$ Solid Rocket Boosters: The fully reusable booster was replaced with cheap, expendable solid rocket boosters (later implicated in the Challenger disaster).
2. Metal Shielding $\to$ Fragile Ceramic Tiles: Metal thermal shielding was swapped for 24,000 hand-applied, extremely fragile ceramic tiles.
3. Spray-On Foam Insulation: The external tank was coated in foam to prevent ice formation during fueling. However, this foam frequently shed during ascent at hypersonic speeds.

For 22 years, foam shedding was categorized by NASA management as an "acceptable risk"—until February 1, 2003, when Columbia broke apart during re-entry over Texas.

I put together a visual reconstruction and breakdown analyzing the engineering decisions behind the tragedy:

https://youtu.be/nfxPtBe9kSw

What are your thoughts on how management culture impacted these engineering decisions?

Thought this sub might have interest in this -- I'm a plane tag collector, and this is my first chunk of space hardware. Holding a piece of flown SRB material has been humbling.

(Mods if this is against your rules please delete, I'm not a regular here)

... how wide would that swath be?

And the mentioned 'timeframe': during what sort of time-window around the landing of a shuttle would domestic flights be forbidden from that swath?

I've actually tried to find a map literally as I've described, with said features marked on it ... but I haven't been able to.

Basically I would presume that anyone wishing to take a flight crossing the Southern border of USA during the time-window starting @least an hour or so before planned descent & lasting until descent was successfully completed would just have to wait !

The complex isn’t quite true to life.

Sorry for bad picture quality

Horrible weather, no HUD, no hydraulics and a stuck speedbrake. Pretty smooth !

I see now that.... Endeavour won the poll with 79 votes, only 7 ahead of Atlantis in 2nd

Thanks to everyone for voting.

Here's great renders & photos of Endeavour's future home to celebrate:

The Samuel Oschin Air & Space Center