Discovery Home

Space shuttle Discovery landed safely this morning, ending both a successful STS-133 mission and its time as a spacecraft.

This time, instead of preparing Discovery for its next mission, NASA personnel will prepare the orbiter to become a museum exhibit. Some would say that's a decade overdue; Columbia should've been preserved in a museum rather than flying until it disintegrated over Texas. Still, for all its limitations and complexities, the shuttle program has allowed mankind to accomplish extraordinary things-- proving the concept of a reusable spaceship, repairing Hubble, building ISS. Those things, and the shuttle, should be celebrated.