I remember when...

[Jeremy S]

Great find! Thanks for that share.

Man. I *cannot* wait to go this year.

Same here! I am really looking forward to Monday evening. This should be a really good one to attend.

Shuttle: A Look Back After 40 Years

Mon, Jul 26, 2021 - Mon, Jul 26, 2021
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location: Theater in the Woods

Event is on your itinerary
Join host Emily Carney in this discussion on NASA past, present, and future. Discussions of Skylab, 40th Anniversary Space Shuttle, 10th Anniversary of Last Flight as well as the future of NASA and space exploration technologies. Carney will be joined on stage with NASA astronauts Fred Haise, Joe Engle, and Robert Crippen as well as Charlie Precourt and Paul Dye.

https://www.eaa.org/eaa/event/Shuttl...84A2DDF388F459

[2ndsegment]

This is where I need to be led by the hand to the first actual takeoff of the Space Transportation System "Shuttle." I was there that morning parked in the GA airport just outside Kennedy with my two young sons. There were stones with big round port holes on the periphery.

The countdown proceeded until two minutes to go and then stopped. It would not resume until the next day so I took my sons back to West Palm Beach so they could go to school. The official explanation was that the mission computer could not communicate with the flight control computer. I am an abstract thinker so in my mind I picture a set of gyros to maintain reference to the pitch-roll-and yaw and a full inertial reference that keeps track of an exact point in space that begins to follow a trajectory from in x-y-z track all the way to the moon with the various stage separation points as various hardware is selected to continue or be dropped out of the main track through the orbits and the landing and static point and lift off ,etc. Bear with me a moment as I had done the mission analysis for a KC-135 communicating with Apollo at the lunar transfer ellipse and also reentry as ships could not reposition far enough at those points. Later I put a deposit on a Get-Away-Special (G-A-S) cannister for an experiment in the cargo bay of the Shuttle orbiter. So I respected LTN-51 INS for military navigation of the C-141 for the "Hanoi Taxi" that brought the POWs home but also was on Commercial Polar flights of that era. The launches of the NAVSTARs on DELTA rockets that brought an era of radio sources and not gyros that we have today is not really of my era before personal computers and even the flight simulators. So tell me all about it!! Even help me distinguish after burner from 5 stage augmentation and even short stack like Viggen or Concorde. With your own eyes and ears!! I'm coming. I hope I don't stumble.