STS-31, the #SpaceShuttle mission that deployed the #Hubble Space Telescope, launched #OTD in 1990: April 24.
However, the astronauts didn't deploy the observatory until April 25.
My view -- which is not held by the good folks at STScI -- is that Hubble's birthday is thus the 25th; I liken it to April 24th is when Hubble's parents drove to the hospital / went into labor, but the 25th is when it was born. #Astrodon#HistoryOfAstronomy#NASA
@jknodlseder@kellylepo A fair question, although -- to stretch my analogy far beyond breaking -- I reckon that that is perhaps more akin to baby's first words. (And with HST you have the added wrinkle of first light or first light after COSTAR?)
Catching up on Twin Peaks (90s) which wasn't on my radar until now. For some reason. And I'm fascinated by Michael J. Anderson, the man from another place, in the Red Room.
Did you know he worked as a computer technician, as part of the ground support system for NASA's Space Shuttle? Check it out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Anderson
Glad I stepped out of my Trump/Ukraine/theworldisgoingdownthedrain routine for this genuine "Wow" moment!
If you haven‘t watched The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth, please do so. It is a document of institutional failure in an organisation that struggled with poor internal communication and a flawed engineering and safety culture, despite the 1986 Challenger disaster. I found it truly shocking.
The Ridiculous Journey Of The First Email From Space
Some interesting #retroComputing items in here, not just the first email, but the old school laptops, the Mac "portable", how the modem used got converted to digital, sent back to earth then back to analog before another modem on an email server.
Also seeing an Astronaut floating away with a massive printout following him - yes they had printers on the shuttle!
"NASA’s retired space shuttle Endeavour was carefully hoisted late Monday and attached to a huge external fuel tank and its two solid rocket boosters at a Los Angeles museum where it will be uniquely displayed as if it is about to blast off."
I was at college, walking up the stairs to my dormroom when I heard about it. I spent the rest of the day glued to my little TV in our room.
As I watched the video that was being replayed over and over, one moment struck me: The twin trails of smoke from the booster rockets looked like the wide-spread arms of a giant in the sky.
It was immediately obvious that there would be no survivors. I cried, and prayed that they never had a chance to know what happened, and feeling awful for all the school kids watching the teacher take off, on TVs at schools around the world.
The cause was later determined to be a simple, small, faulty O-ring. It would be months later before any human remains were recovered, found at the bottom of the ocean.
@AnneTheWriter1 Was a student at the Univ of Florida. It was a cold cloudless morning. The chemistry lecture had just ended. Looking to the southeast, I could see the smoke trails from the SRBs and from when the explosion took place. 😢
The Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex built the Atlantis #Museum, they built life-size replicas of the Space Shuttle External Tank and Solid #Rocket Boosters directly in front of the building which held #SpaceShuttle Atlantis.