More rollout photos

You may have already seen my photos of yesterday’s space shuttle rollout, but Andy took the good camera to work last night at the launch pad and got some more. Andy is the one on the right in the first picture.

Rolling out

Today was another milestone for us at work, as the space shuttle made it’s way very very slowly from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad B (where Andy works). A couple of co-workers and I went up there to check it out this afternoon.

Here is the building that it rolled out of; you can see the opening where the stack came out, which is remarkably small compared to the massive building.

Getting closer!

At work we are getting a lot closer to actually launching again. The orbiter was just mated to the external tank and solid rocket boosters a couple of days ago, and the whole stack is almost ready to roll out to the launch pad, which is where Andy works, so he will be working a lot of overtime coming up. He is back on second shift so I am here by myself at night, but at least there is someone home with the dogs most of the time. Here are some incredible photos of the stacking process, where the orbiter is mated to the rest of the stack. These are not photos that I took, but they were emailed to me. There is only a very minimum of people allowed in the Vehicle Assembly Building during the procedure, because in a worst case scenario a booster could light off and suck every bit of oxygen out of the building and kill everyone in a split second. It is quite a dangerous operation. I hope you enjoy the photos of a delicate operation that the public rarely gets to see.

Neat, huh?