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Have some more shuttle program /p/.
We did great things with that old bird. I miss it. Story time I guess.
When I used to lurk /p/, long before they ever talked about killing off the Shuttle program, I was a cable guy. We used to watch them go and if I was on a job site I'd grab the customer and walk outside with them and watch them go, it was kind of what you did when you can see them being launched from your backyard.
There were a handful of pilots who were qualified to fly this 747 that carried the Shuttle back to Florida from California in the event it had to land at Edwards AFB in CA due to adverse weather in Florida. When they came in, these Air Force ex-fighter pilots would hot dog that damn 747 and fly it almost at stall speed barely 500 feet above the ground, all the way down the mainland next to US1 down to US192 40 miles south of KSC, then loop around 192 and head north up the beach to show it off for all the tourists, then land at Kennedy Space Center.
I managed to see them do this and they were so low to the ground you could almost read the pilot names on the side of the 747 near the cockpit, and I remember seeing the individual tiles on the Shuttle. Everyone would pull off US1 and watch it go by, we were proud to watch it go by.
