A Dying Breed

The good part: I've got a cool photo of the Space Shuttle.  But first, why that's important:

The Space Shuttle has one more flight left.  Ever.  Nearly 25 years of service, the only space plane ever used,* the largest crew capacity of any spaceship ever, and generally the greatest space vehicle ever created.   It is assembled in the largest building on the planet.  It has captured our national consciousness in a way that no other (real) spaceship ever did.  It was originally designed as a tool to build the Space Station; a task which it has finally completed.  It is a dinosaur, built in the age before computer-aided design; NASA's current director called it "a launch vehicle with a very heavy shroud."  Be that as it may, it is a national treasure and it will be missed.

I'm in the habit of visiting the NASA human spaceflight gallery, which posts all the photos taken during shuttle missions, space station missions, and pretty much everything else from manned spaceflight, going back two generations.  Pretty neat stuff.  In the latest batch from the penultimate shuttle mission, I found three photos taken during a spacewalk out on one of the solar panels:

It's obvious to me that these three photos were meant to be a panorama, showing the full extent of the habitat section of the space station, with the shuttle docked.  No one else seems to have noticed this, so I had an opportunity on my hands.

I have several tools I use for automated panorama creation, my favorites being Hugin and Autostitch.  In this case, they both failed me.  I guess space stations are too complicated.  But this ain't my first time at a rodeo, so I whipped out Gimp and stitched myself a panorama.  Here she is:

If you look closely, you can see where the three photos meet: at the Japanese research module, and in the clouds to the right of the automated resupply vehicle.  In between, I did some clever blending and made heavy use of layer masks.  If you'd like to see the original file, here it is.

This panorama is beautiful not only because it shows the space station, a wonder in its own right, but because it also shows the space shuttle, something that will be seen aloft only one more time, ever.  The station is a generation newer, it's the largest thing ever built in space, and represents a grand achievement of international cooperation, with modules from the US, Russia, Italy, Japan, and Canada.  In this photo, the construction phase is over; the station is complete.  But next to this grand achievement, the shuttle floats like a graceful swan, neither dwarfed nor overshadowed by the younger generation of spaceflight.

So, this photo represents not just the shuttle itself, but the shuttle's final and greatest achievement.  A fitting epitaph for the greatest spaceship ever created.

J<

PS: Here's the rest of my collection of space photos, collected over the years:

*For those of you who would argue: Buran doesn't count because humans never flew in it.  SpaceShipTwo will count just as soon as it leaves the test phase.  Whenever that will be.