Space Shuttle Discovery: A jumbo final flight for shuttle

IT WAS a strangely inelegant final flight for the Space Shuttle Discovery, which travelled piggyback to its last resting place on a jumbo jet yesterday.

The spacecraft, the fleet leader of Nasa’s three surviving shuttles, completed its last space flight in March last year.

For its last voyage, Discovery took off atop a modified Boeing 747 jet that taxied down the Kennedy Space Centre’s runway at dawn.

After looping around Washington DC, the shuttle carrier plane touched down at the US capital’s Dulles International Airport.

Discovery, which first flew in August 1984, is to be transferred to the Smithsonian Institution’s nearby Steven F Udvar-Hazy Centre in Chantilly, Virginia, the hub of America’s National Air and Space Museum and its official repository of space artefacts.