🐦 People of my generation may remember the space shuttle mounted on a 747. This reminded me of t

[soothsayer]

Link to tweet

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[bottomofthehill]

1. Amazing picture.

Funny, I do remember the space shuttles being piggy backed around. Also with the PRESIDENTS address to Congress coming up it brings back the Challenger tragedy.

They flew the last shuttle to Dulles to go to the Air and Space museum for one last piggy back trip around. It was amazing to see flying over DC one last time.

[Diamond_Dog]

2. I remember

When our space program was a source of national pride....in elementary school our class watched the splashdowns on TV ... we knew the names of the astronauts... they were heroes.

[dawg day]

3. LOL.

I remember seeing the space shuttle fly on the 747. I mean, I very much remember seeing that in person. (But I'm also not at all sure it wasn't on TV... visual memories are so unreliable.)

[eppur_se_muova]

4. I remember that particularly vividly ... one day I was walking across campus in Baltimore

when I looked up and saw the Shuttle on a 747. Now, at the time, there were four Shuttles, and they tended to be at Edwards or the Cape, or en route between, when they weren't actually in orbit. In short, you did not see them everywhere, every day. If you weren't in NV or FL or on the flight path in between, there was no reason for you to see the Shuttle being ferried like that. And there was certainly no reason for it to be flying so LOW and slow as that -- I mean, I could see every detail of it. But it shouldn't be there! I looked around to see if anyone else was reacting to it, but there were only a couple of people within sight, and, for the first time in my life I wondered if I was really "seeing things" -- hallucinating, though I knew of no reason I should be. So I followed it as long as I could see it, and yes, I did hear the engines too. It was real enough, I just had absolutely no clue why it should have been flying over Baltimore, well NNW of DC.

Evening news confirmed that the Shuttle had overflown the Capitol Building, where Congress was debating a NASA funding bill, just to remind them what they were buying. Apparently someone at NASA decided that as long as they were there they would overfly the STSI (Space Telescope Science Institute) which is on the JHU campus for whatever reason. So I had a memorable, and thoroughly unexpected, experience. Just wish I had known in advance, so it wouldn't have been so unsettling.

[soothsayer]

5. That's great!

[csziggy]

6. I saw it fly low over Tallahassee, Florida

Apparently it was purely PR for them to be that low over a city but it was cool. I didn't have my camera with me that day and it was before cell phones with cameras, so I didn't get my own images. The local news did have it as a feature on the news that night - of course they had been alerted. See the PR aspect.

Your experience reminds me of seeing a C5 Galaxy cargo plane fly over the college I attended in St. Petersburg, Florida. That was surreal since it looked like a normal plane but was HUGE and noisy. That would have been in 1970-71. The plane was brand new then and was probably flying into or out of MacDill AFB in Tampa Bay.