Space Shuttle Columbia, October 1994

With the Space Shuttle program winding down, I can add some photos of the shuttle and its infrastructure here as something that will all too soon become a thing of the past.

These are photos I took of the Space Shuttle Columbia in October 1994. Columbia was on her way from Florida to California where it would undergo several months of modifications and upgrades. As you can see, the shuttle sitting on the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft is huge, and it can't fly cross-country without refueling several times. On this trip, she stopped in Huntsville AL before landing at Ellington Field southeast of Houston on October 10, 1994, where she stayed for the night. Ellington is just a couple miles from NASA's Johnson Space Center, so a lot of NASA folks went out to look at the big bird.

Columbia was lost on Feb. 1, 2003, as she was coming in to Florida to complete mission STS-107. The orbiter came apart and the crew was killed.



More photos on my Flickr page.