SYSTEMS: Space, the final frontier - apparently. Forget the star-struck, Trekkie nature of space exploration for a moment and note that there is a serious amount of jockeying for position going on up there. READ MORE on New York Magazine.
At dawn one morning last November - just as the edge of earth comprising Florida spun into the field of light bursting from roughly 93 million miles away - she emerged one last time from the Vehicle Assembly Building.
Who is "she"?
This was what had been billed as the final mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, a 9.8-mile journey to her final resting place at the Kennedy Space Center’s visitors’ complex.
That Atlantis’s journey would begin at the VAB—525 feet tall, the largest single-story structure in the world, having sprouted a half-century ago in the frenzy of the space race, as stupendous an achievement as each of the space-faring rockets that would be assembled inside it—multiplied the emotion.
But change is coming...
READ MORE on New York Magazine
NB:Earth orbit image via Sutterstock.