![]() ![]() Once the jet is out of the way, the huge cranes will lower Discovery near the ground. Then the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft will back out from beneath it. Discovery will be demated from its ride and lifted into the air by a pair of giant cranes (there's no Mate-Demate gantry here). Before they land at the airport, however, the two are scheduled to take a twirl roughly 1,500 feet above major landmarks in Washington, D.C., so people on the ground can welcome Discovery.Īt the Dulles airport, the attachment process will be performed in reverse. The linked vehicles will then take off the runway much like a normal airliner and fly up the Eastern seaboard to the Udvar-Hazy Center, a hangar-turned-museum near the Dulles International Airport. Once Discovery is lifted in the air by the Mate-Demate device, the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft will roll beneath it, positioning itself under the belly of the orbiter, which can then be lowered down and attached via three struts protruding from the Boeing's fuselage. This contraption uses two 100-foot steel towers with a massive lift beam in between them to hoist the orbiter off the ground. To load the shuttle onto the jet, NASA uses a giant gantry-like machine called the Mate-Demate device. Here, the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, the modified 747 jet that will carry it across the country, will be waiting. On Saturday (April 14), Discovery is set to roll out from the Vehicle Assembly Building, the 52-story building where it's gone through recent processing, to the Shuttle Landing Facility, the expansive runway where space shuttles touch down when they land at KSC. So exactly how do you take a 100-ton space shuttle and fly it on ferry hops across the country? Here's a look at how the whole process is done: And then you have the whole technical team that has just pulled together to choreograph it. We’ve had outreach and communications efforts that make up the non-technical side. "We've had different meetings with airport operations at different airports to make sure the security is appropriate. "When you think of the pilot that will be flying the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, to the ferry manager, to coordinating with FAA and the different Air Force and military facilities between Florida, Washington, D.C. "The team is just amazing,"Dorothy Rasco manager of Space Shuttle Program Transition and Retirement at Houston's Johnson Space Center, told. And in addition to a slew of complex equipment, the maneuver requires significant manpower. The transportation of shuttles is a complicated affair, involving giant cranes and rejiggered Boeing jets.
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