errr...never saw this pic before!
Posted on 08/07/2005 4:25:15 PM PDT by KevinDavis
I've seen a couple of landings at Edwards - what fun. I love it when the approach brings that big pretty bird right over the house.
errr...never saw this pic before!
that's the place!! only I saw it from the train,got some pic's too, around here someplace.
SLC-6 was first developed to launch giant Titan IIIM rockets with Air Force crews and Manned Orbiting Laboratory space stations. MOL was canceled in 1969 and the facility was completed and then mothballed, remaining unused for more than a decade. In the late 1970s, the Air Force prepared to convert the facility to launch Space Shuttles on classified missions to place reconnaissance satellites in polar orbits. The extensive construction plans brought considerable protests from local Chumash Native American activists, who believe that stretch of the coast is sacred and the gateway to the afterlife. SLC-6 became the most massive construction project on the base. Large mobile structures were erected to enclose the Shuttle on its launch pad. Shuttle and payload processing buildings, a seaport and a lengthened runway were also constructed. But SLC-6 soon ran into numerous technical and schedule problems amid allegations of drug use among the construction crews and shoddy workmanship. The first Vandenberg Space Shuttle launch was scheduled for 1986, but after the Challenger disaster the facility was placed in hibernation and then closed again, after the expenditure of billions of dollars. Rumors persisted that the site had been cursed by the Indians, but it had actually been cursed by poor planning and bad workmanship. Despite the expenditure of many billions of dollars, not a single rocket was launched from SLC-6 until 1995, when a small Athena rocket lifted off from a corner of the mothballed facility. It, and another rocket launched in 1997, failed to achieve orbit, but a third Athena launch in 1999, carrying the Ikonos-1 commercial imagery satellite, was successful. SLC-6 has been converted to a launch facility for Delta IV rockets.
A landing at Edwards?
Is it possible?
that pic will make a great april fools joke....something like...oh, while Nasa grounded the shuttle, the military borrowed one, etc...
probable!
4th Landing Opportunity
Edwards AFB
606a Central Deorbit burn, 712 am Central
5th Landing Opportunity
White Sands
609a Central, 718am Central
6th Landing Opportunity
Edwards AFB
744a Central, 847am Central
it sure would hehe, now I wish I had thought of that!!
Why not Key West then?? Could be the Margaritaville
Shuttle Center .. LOL. (It IS the furthest southern US point.)
Man I would love to be up there.
My guess is that there wasn't an infrastructure in the Key Islands at the time the space center was built. :)
I figure Houston is there because it was probably in the running, but even if the Cape was at Brownsville, you'd still be over land within minutes of launch.
/talking out my boondah off
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