Endeavour ready to set sail one final time

Now peacefully parked in the Vehicle Assembly Building, the space shuttle Endeavour is counting down the days until she bids farewell to the Kennedy Space Center and rides piggyback atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft to Los Angeles next month.

Shortly after Endeavour rolled from her hangar to the VAB storage bay on Aug. 16, Spaceflight Now photographer Walter Scriptunas II shot this gallery that captures the beauty of the spacecraft, with the aerodynamic tail cone for the ferryflight already installed. The AstroVan that drove astronauts to the launch pad is parked next to the shuttle for tourists from the KSC Visitor Complex to see.

Endeavour's rich history of service featured 25 spaceflights over 19 years that spanned 122,883,151 miles traveled, 4,677 orbits of the planet and 299 days aloft.

The ship's maiden voyage in May 1992 was a dramatic adventure to rescue the wayward Intelsat 603 telecommunications satellite that required the astronauts to improvise with the first-ever three-man spacewalk to manually grab the spacecraft after attempts using a specially-designed capture bar failed to work. The ship also conducted the first Hubble Space Telescope servicing in 1993, one of the stellar achievements for the space program that installed corrective optics to fix the observatory's flawed vision.

Other trips in the 1990s deployed and retrieved satellites, mapped the Earth with radar and scanned the cosmos with payloads carried in the orbiter's cargo bay. She also visited the Russian space station Mir once.

Then Endeavour opened the International Space Station era by launching the first American piece of the outpost -- the Unity connecting node -- to begin orbital construction in December 1998. Subsequent flights by Endeavour would take up the station's initial solar array power tower, all three sections of Canada's robotics including the arm, mobile transporter and Dextre hands, the Japanese science facility's "attic" and "back porch" for research, and the Tranquility utility room with the Cupola.

The 12th and final mission to the International Space Station by Endeavour finished the American assembly efforts, which this ship originally began, by adding the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and a final spare parts deck.

Construction of Endeavour started in September 1987 as a replacement vehicle for Challenger. The spaceplane was rolled out of the Palmdale factory in April 1991. She became NASA's fifth and final operational space shuttle with her inaugural launch a year later.

Endeavour plans to leave KSC on Sept. 17 and arrive at the Los Angeles International Airport on Sept. 20. After a day-and-a-half procession through city streets, she is expected to reach the California Science Center on Oct. 13 and go on public display at the pavilion built in Exposition Park on Oct. 30.

See our coverage from Endeavour's final mission.

Photo credit: Walter Scriptunas II/Spaceflight Now

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