Riding on the back of a modified 747, Discovery NASA’s veteran space shuttle Discovery did a final lap of honour before becoming a museum piece. It flew low over the monuments of the nation’s capital Washington before landing at Dulles International Airport en route to its permanent new home with the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum’s centre in Chantilly, Virginia. Before rolling to a stop at Dulles, the visibly singed and scarred spacecraft provided a final but memorable spectacle – a 45-minute fly-around, flying low over the US capital’s iconic sights – the dome of the Capitol, the White House rose garden, the tip of the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian’s original Air and Space Museum. Of the four space shuttles introduced by NASA in the early to mid-1980s, Discovery was the third after Columbia and Challenger yet it has flown the most missions. First launched in 1984, it made its final touchdown at the Kennedy Space Centre in March 2011 after blasting into space as many as 39 times.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration reportedly had to lobby hard for permission from the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the secret service and other agencies for the flyover, which repeatedly brought the mammoth pair into restricted air space. But it was certainly a PR scoop for NASA, whose space exploration programmes have been blunted by repeated budget cuts.
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