Farewell to Atlantis: the Final Flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis

Today, at 2:20 pm, NASA will be launching the Space Shuttle Atlantis on its 32nd and final mission into space. By November this year, the entire space shuttle program will end, after a final mission is concluded with the space shuttle Endeavour. Atlantis began its maiden voyage on 3rd October 1985. The NASA space shuttle program began its first orbital-operational mission to space with Columbia on 11th November 1982 (Columbia disintegrated in February 2003 while returning to Earth)

However, Atlantis will be used as an emergency shuttle in case of future space emergency with the International Space Station. But there will be no more regular American space craft launching until 2015, so at that point, NASA will have to rely on Russia’s rocket program to lift its astronauts and cargo to the ISS for five years, maybe more.

There have been 6 space shuttles in its entire history of the program: Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. Only Enterprise was never used for space missions, only for testing and promotional purposes. Sadly, Challenger and Columbia disintegrated in unfortunate accidents.

If you have the time to read, with a hot thing for deep technical and historical stuff, here’s the Wikipedia article on the Space Shuttle.

Interesting note: the title of this blog, “Farewell to Atlantis…”. Does it seems familiar to you? Remind you of something from a recent movie last year, now on DVD? Here’s the hint: it starred John Cusack and he plays a character who wrote a book in this super-mega-disaster movie.

If you know what I’m talking about, then I tell you… it’s all sekrit konspiracy stuff!

Ancient Atlantis Founded At Last?

UPDATE: Debunked? See below this blog.

About 3.5 miles below the sea level, on the floor of Atlantic Ocean, there seem to be a massive non-natural type of structure revealed for the first time, thanks to the latest version of Google Earth, which offered the newest images of the world’s ocean floors. It is quite an incredibly discovery. The Sun.co of UK posted this article not too long ago. Thanks to a good source, I obtained the specific latitude and longtitude numbers of the location so I can verify it. Sure enough, to my surprise, it is right there. I took three screenshots of what I just saw, see below (click on each to expand to full size):

My head is spinning from this. This is indeed quite amazing. It reinforces my long-held beliefs that there had been some kind of a major civilization over 10,000 years ago. It might be the long-lost Atlantis but it might not be at all. Although, it may have inspired the lore of the legendary Atlantis as told by the Greek philosopher, Plato in 350 B.C.

I hope scientists can get the ships out there and send the deep submersibles to investigate down there. It could be the greatest find of the new millennium.

UPDATE (10:00 am): Debunked? Googlesighting.com has the low-down on this weirdness: The sea bed imagery comes from a variety of bathymetry sources, including the SIO (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), and Mr Sandwell added the false underwater canyons so that they could see where the SIO’s data was being used.

Dang! It’s not anything resembling the long-lost Atlantis. Oh, well. Someday, somewhere, we’ll find it.