Shuttle over the bridge

Even if they had, it would still have been much safer than lauching the thing.

Sylvia.

And risk destroying the bridge, the 747, and Endeavor? I don't think a great photo op is worth the risk.

Yep. We were getting short of bird brains. ...Jim Thompson

Nice to see you posting again!

wow! When ms macy and I first started piloting, she celebrated by taking me on a tour of the Bay and flying in that exact same location - between the towers - Christmas Eve Day ??, but we ended up with a 3 helicopter escort out of the region.

Try that today and an F-18 will shoot you down!

IMHO its a bit of a sad sight. I recall my father (who has spend most of his career designing parts for space crafts and satellites) giving me a scale model of a space shuttle when the space shuttles where introduced. Its a pity the US didn't come up with a replacement. Technological decline...

Rumour has it that the pilot who made a looping with a 747 got fired on te spot :-)

A 747 doing a loop? I remember when Boeing introduced the 707 the pilot did a barrel-roll in front of all the spectators. Video of that is online.

..

Jim always under-counts by at least one. I can't say that I've noticed any such shortage, but my standards are probably higher than his.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Maybe they learned their lesson with the XB-70 photo-opportunity.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Holy crap, they got a photo alright!

Putting humans into space is dangerous, expensive, and useless.

Nixon basically shredded NASA. It's not technological decline so much as it was lack of political will.

-- Les Cargill

But it came back, until Obama made their major duty "improving Muslim relations"... such great science, huh ?:-(

...Jim Thompson

Without putting humans in space decades ago, we would not be able to communicate globally in an instant. There are hundreds of examples of how the space program benefits mankind. We wouldn't have lots of technological wonders unless humans traveled outside of Earth. Not everything can be done with a robot, like repairing Hubble for instance.

Absurd. We had communications satellites beginning in 1958. The first manned orbital flight was in 1961. How did manned spaceflight ever help communications satellite technology? I can't recall a single manned communications satellite.

I can't think of a single useful result from manned spaceflight. Lots of billions of dollars, and lots of lives, have been lost.

There are hundreds of examples of

Name one benefit from manned space flight.

We wouldn't have lots of

Nonsense. We'd have more, if so much money and talent hadn't been wasted on spam-in-a-can.

Not

We could have built many earth-based telescopes, with resolution superior to Hubble, for the cost of one Hubble repair mission. The first repair mission was to fix a defective mirror, which wouldn't have happened on a ground telescope, and would have been easy to fix if it had.

New space telescopes aren't being built to be repairable in space. It would be cheaper to just launch more of them.

Or maybe common sense.

You've forgotten Venus Equilateral!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Mad Holiday

Use of the matter duplicator allows the staff of Venus Equilateral to invent a method of instantaneous communication. Since line-of-sight is no longer necessary for communication, Venus Equilateral itself is obsolete, and the staff prepare to abandon the relay station. Meanwhile, Kingman sneaks aboard the station, rigs a power transmitter to lower the station's temperature to absolute zero, and kidnaps Walt Franks and Christine Baler, leaving them to freeze to death. Not knowing of the new instantaneous communication, Kingman assumes that the station has stopped relaying messages because of his sabotage, and he sues to gain VE's communications franchise for Terran Electric. Following a Christmas party set against the backdrop of the station's falling temperature, the Channings and Farrell rescue Franks and Baler, and the entire staff of VE departs, leaving Kingman to try to maintain the frigid station alone.

Gosh, how could I have missed such, well, such?