The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 Read Online Free PDF Page A

with the massive orange-coloured external fuel tank and the two solid rocket boosters.
    The whole assembly sits atop a mobile launch platform that is moved slowly to the launch pad – 5.6km away – on a Crawler-Transporter, a gigantic self-powered land vehicle that can move 7900 tonnes at a top speed of 1.6km/h. Two of these were built, for US$14 million each, in the 1960s. Each has two control cabins at both ends and requires a team of nearly 30 engineers, technicians and drivers to operate the vehicle on its six-hour journey.
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    Launch Pad 39A is where shuttles fly from, part of a launch complex built for the Apollo program. Its sister, 39B, was deactivated in 2007, and Discovery was the last to use it; NASA is now offering the pad and facilities to private companies for the commercial space market.
    By the time I reached the press site, engineers had begun loading the shuttle’s external tank with about two million litres of cryogenic propellants. The orbiter’s onboard fuel cells, inertial instruments and communications had been activated. Almost 4.8km to the northeast, I could see the orange external tank and just make out the white livery of Discovery . The beast was awakening.
    Soon the six astronauts would begin making their way to the pad. I took a vantage point near the iconic digital countdown clock, which is not just big – it’s mammoth. A little the worse for wear, it uses large, old-school incandescent light bulbs to shape its numbers. Behind it, there’s a long series of lakes, coves and creeks between the elevated mound where media facilities are located, and the launch pad. More than 200 people were already on the site, and the foreshore was festooned with camera tripods.
    The News Centre, as the area is known, has several buildings: a 100-seat auditorium for press conferences, 15 site support offices, common workspace for journalists, and two libraries. Major outlets such as CBS, NBC, CNN and Reuters have their own prefab shacks. The main press room has six large LCD screens with direct feeds from various sites: the gantry leading into the orbiter, weather and radar maps, and multiple angles of the launch pad.
    In the hours that followed, the astronauts entered the orbiter in their bright orange spacesuits and strapped in, their helmets by their sides, and began a long list of verbal checks with Launch Control at the Kennedy Space Center and Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Technicians in white overalls, baseball caps and head-mounted radios closed the hatch, checked seals for leaks and went through seemingly hundreds of detailed crosschecks.
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    Discovery was named after two historic vessels of the past: one used by 17th century English navigator Henry Hudson to explore Canada’s Hudson Bay and search for a northwest passage from the Atlantic to India; and one by British explorer James Cook in the 1770s in voyages in the South Pacific, leading to the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands.
    â€˜We’re wrapping up the space shuttle program,’ astronaut Steve Lindsey, commander of Discovery ’s last mission – known as STS-133 – told reporters before takeoff. ‘Besides the excitement of completing the International Space Station and all the things we do, I hope people get a sense of the history of what the shuttle is and what we’ve done and what’s ending. Because they’ll probably never see anything like it flying again.’
    And Cape Canaveral has been where all the journeys began.Since 1961 there have been 165 manned launches here – from the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station where the pioneering Mercury and Gemini capsules were launched, to the Kennedy Space Center, built for the Apollo missions.
    Since they first lit up the skies in 1981, space shuttles have been the workhorses of human spaceflight, taking more than 800 passengers into space. The most diligent of them has been Discovery