Old scan of the Space Shuttle

Nice...

Jon.

John W wrote:
Go to this web site and you can get the SR71 refueling similar to your shot:
http://www.dfrc.nasa.g​ov …ry/photo/SR-71/index.html

That's a cool pic. I have no idea where mine came from. It was a birthday gift from a Staff Sergeant stationed at Barksdale. Allegedly it came from a crew chief on a KC-135 that was stationed at Barksdale AFB at the time. That was 1985 / 86ish so there weren't a lot of publicity photos of the SR71. The web was still a military and academic "thing".

Slits pod and tile pattern on the horizontal stablizier....Columbia was the only one that had that

I can also tell you that since you said it was taken in 1986 that means it was being returned to KSC after the STS-61C mission, the last mission before Challenger =(

here is an old pic I found on the net of 11 of them,

The Notorious STG wrote:
Slits pod and tile pattern on the horizontal stablizier....Columbia was the only one that had that

I can also tell you that since you said it was taken in 1986 that means it was being returned to KSC after the STS-61C mission, the last mission before Challenger =(

Challenger... I remember that day very well. As I do Columbia. Very sad days... and more...

You should see the video that I have. They zoomed up on the nose and you can see quite a bit of detail.

No kidding??? Then my date is wrong. I was in Garden City, KS (definitely a misnomer) when Challenger blew up. Must have been ?? 1988 - 1989. I was trying to remember what grade my oldest son was in when Columbia came to Barksdale. We took him out of school to see it That's where my date estimate came from. He's 22 now so he must have been in the first grade in 1989... ack... that seems like forever ago...

Alrighty... If someone knows a better way to extract images from a video (DVD) than the cheesy screen capture programs that I have then let me know and I'll try to get better caps.

There is one section of the video where the burners are lit... I'll see if I can capture that too.

This is from the first minute or so of the video.

Mike6158 wrote:
Challenger... I remember that day very well. As I do Columbia. Very sad days... and more...

You should see the video that I have. They zoomed up on the nose and you can see quite a bit of detail.

No kidding??? Then my date is wrong. I was in Garden City, KS (definitely a misnomer) when Challenger blew up. Must have been ?? 1988 - 1989. I was trying to remember what grade my oldest son was in when Columbia came to Barksdale. We took him out of school to see it That's where my date estimate came from. He's 22 now so he must have been in the first grade in 1989... ack... that seems like forever ago...

Actually Challenger happenned in 1986, Jan 28. (Yeah, we're comin up on the 20 year...can you beleive it?)

I said horizontal stabilizer before about Columbia...duhh...I meant vertical stabilizer.

I remember when the Challenger exploded I was in Junior High living in California when it happened. Later on that year we moved to Reykjavik, Iceland, about 1 month before Reagan and Gorbechev had thier Summit Meeting.

Here's 3 more of the SR71 taking off. I'll put the last three in another post

Note that the gear are already transitioning up.

I put a bunch of video captures of Columbia arriving, static, and leaving HERE They aren't real good as they are BMP's that I changed to 800 x and saved as JPG's but I don't know how to do anything with the files on the DVD that I made.

Mike6158 wrote:
I put a bunch of video captures of Columbia arriving, static, and leaving HERE They aren't real good as they are BMP's that I changed to 800 x and saved as JPG's but I don't know how to do anything with the files on the DVD that I made.

Wow. Thanks a lot, those are really cool. But those are of a different trip than the picture at the beginning of this thread, as on these slides the 747 still hasn't even been repainted yet, still in American Airlines colors, and Columbia's markings are also different, from its earlier days.

ROFL... I didn't even notice that. The video came with the SR71 video that was given to me. I just assumed it was the same stuff. The first pics are from pics that I took with my F1. I scanned them yesterday

I'm uploading a bunch of captures from the SR71 video to my PHOTO SITE as I type this. I wish that I knew how to convert the files on the DVD that I burned last night to something useful for the net but I don't. If you could somehow load those Shuttle pics or SR71 pics into gif animation software you could get a pretty decent video. I was hitting the capture button about once a second.

From what I remember, the SR-71's were fueled on the ground just enough to get them in the air, up to cruising speeds and strait to the fueling rig. The outer skin of the SR-71's also made up some of the interior sections of the plane. The fuel tanks were one of them. There's good points and bad points to that. In the case of fuel, it was sort of an "issue". The skin of the Blackbird had rather large gaps between the panel sections. As a result, the fuel tanks would leak. So they would fuel them enough to get them airborne and up to speed so the skin would heat up and expand which caused the panels to seal up. Once at the bird was warmed up, it would slow down to top off with fuel and then climb to it's cruising altitude and speed for it's mission. The fuel you would see "dripping" from the them during take-off was actually fuel leaking from the tanks... I also remember something about the surface temperatures on the leading edges, nose and canopy being in the range of 2,500 degree's when at cruising speeds of mach +3 while the air temps around the plane would be way below freezing. The crew also wore suits similar to what our astronauts used because of the severe altitudes they flew at. Here's a cool site if you are interested in them: SR-71.org

Jon.

A friend in Navy Air said he saw that & mentioned the loose fit. Fire trucks followed it down the runway.