Discovery arriving at the Smithsonian

[hobsini2]

http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/546300_10150937521848066_688823065_13003967_1582049862_n.jpg

A friend of mine post this pic on facebook of the space shuttle Discovery being piggy backed as it lands at Dulles Airport.

[1995hoo]

I went down to the hill by the Netherlands Carillon and got this batch. It's really impressive to see it in person and pictures simply do not do it justice. We've all seen Boeing 747s many times, but seeing one with a space shuttle perched on top is something totally different.






































The following image is a small portion of the sixth picture above. I excised a 1024 x 768 portion to show that portion of the picture at full size instead of reducing it for upload.






Finally....I did not take these next two (they're NASA images), but I sure wish I could have. In the second one, Enterprise is on the left and Discovery is on the right:

[triplemultiplex]

Wow, great shots!

Once the shuttles are all at their designated museums, we'll never see images like these ever again.  Strapping one of those bad boys onto a 747 is objectively cool and was the one aspect of the shuttle program that really impressed me as a child.  Like that was icing on the cake.  It's was cool enough that these things rocketed into outer space and landed like airplanes, but to see that set up where it's like a double airplane; man that was a young boy's gateway drug into astronomy.