Man, today is a busy day. Between the NFL Draft and the royal wedding, there’s a lot going on. To add to the list, there’s another historic milestone about to go down that’s expected to draw 700,000 people to the beaches of Florida. The Space Shuttle Endeavour will be making its last flight today; there’s one more shuttle flight, and then the space shuttle program undertaken by NASA over 30 years ago will end.
Over 45,000 observation tickets have been distributed by NASA, and nearly 700.000 more are expected to line the beaches and cram into beach-side parking lots to tailgate and watch the space shuttle flight. From across the country, people have been trickling into the area surrounding the Kennedy Space Center for a chance to catch a glimpse of one of the last space shuttle flights. Now, it’s up for the weather to cooperate until 3:45 PM Eastern time, when Endeavour takes off from Cape Canaveral to deliver an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and various other spare parts to the International Space Station.
This is Endeavor’s last flight, but the real last flight for the space shuttles will be the June 28th flight of Atlantis; Discovery’s last flight was February 24.