Taking a break from political goings-on, some Space Shuttle-related news….

This morning (Monday) the shuttle Discovery will land at Kennedy Space Center at 8:48 EDT (1248 GMT). The craft will make a rare “descending node” overflight of the continental US en route to landing in Florida. Here are maps of the shuttle’s path if it lands on orbit 222 as planned, or on the next orbit.

There are only a limited number of Shuttle flights yet to fly, so each one is a re-entry closer to consigning this era of space travel to the history books. If you are amongst the US readers of this blog (and welcome) then do your best to get outside and see it.

Spaceweather.com says:  

“…it takes the shuttle about 35 minutes to traverse the path shown… Observers in the northwestern USA will see the shuttle shortly after 5 am PDT blazing like a meteoric fireball through the dawn sky. As Discovery makes its way east, it will enter daylight and fade into the bright blue background. If you can’t see the shuttle, however, you might be able to hear it. The shuttle produces a sonic double-boom that reaches the ground about a minute and a half after passing overhead.”

For the future, NASA is sending its newest humanoid robot (known as Robonaut2) on board the space shuttle’s final mission. R2 is capable of using the same tools as humans, which should be enough to terrify anyone who saw the last 30 seconds of the remade BattleStar Galactica series.

Neil Armstrong, for one, isn’t impressed by the future outlined for the US space program as outlined by Obama, and has criticised the proposed revisions to the US space program. Armstrong, along with astronauts James Lovell and Eugene Cernan, calls the proposal ‘devastating’. So enjoy it while you can – soon you’ll have to be Chinese or Indian to have any chance of success if you want to put “astronaut” on your career choices list at school.