View the final flight of the Space Shuttle, on Friday

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UPDATED TIMELINE FOR FLIGHT: the following includes references to time for the Space Shuttle's final flight. All are adjusted as of Friday morning at 8:23 am.
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The Thursday music scene AND a preview of this weekend's FESTIVALS are in today's earlier edition, available just below or in the sidebar at left, depending on which edition you are reading. There's PLENTY there, so don't miss it.
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THIS is a guide to the final flight, ever, of the Space Shuttle. Included is where you can see it Friday, and why we believe you should want to.
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ENDEAVOUR: THE FINAL FLIGHT OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE
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Friday morning, space shuttle orbiter ENDEAVOUR makes the final flight, ever, by any of NASA's fleet of human-carrying spaceships that launched as rockets and landed as gliders.
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You can witness it from many places in Los Angeles, Ventura, and Orange Counties.
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It's one of the strangest airborne objects you'll ever see, especially if it flies directly over you. It's a gangly mass of wings and tails, a delta-winged spacecraft mounted piggyback atop one of the two modified 747s used to return orbiters from landings at Edwards AFB in California to the Kennedy Space Center's launch facility in Florida. And this final flight has already traced that route one last time, but in reverse. Endeavour landed early Thursday afternoon at Edwards.
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At 8:15 am Friday morning, the flying menagerie took-off from Edwards. That's an hour later than previously announced, to the give extra time for Bay Area fog to burn-off. The shuttle will circle Edwards and buzz Palmdale, where all the shuttles were built, and Lancaster, the only town on planet earth that regularly had spaceships using city streets. Each time one was built, it needed to journey to Edwards, overland, for the trip to Florida, and it rolled through the desert town.
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That seems like a long time ago, before Antelope Valley's aerospace industry collapsed and Lancaster became known for a huge state prison.
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Edwards is where we first broke the sound barrier back in 1947, and where Neil Armstrong and other test pilots flew the X-15 rocket plane to the edge of space.
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Friday morning in the Mojave Desert will be one last remembrance of all that once was.
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Then the final flight will proceed to Northern California, to circle the state capitol building in Sacramento and fly over the Golden Gate Bridge, rounding the San Francisco bay area. The trip south will fly-over coastal cities and Vandenberg AFB, and over Santa Barbara and Ventura.
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When shuttles were delivered for display in Washington, D.C. and New York City, the people of the Eastern Seaboard were treated to low-level flyovers. Now it's our turn, one-time-only.
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Endeavour will reach L.A. airspace about 11:30 am, and make at least one big loop of the region. Flyovers of key points will be made at about 1,500 feet.
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Recommended viewing and photography locations are L.A. City Hall, the California Science Center (where the shuttle will make its retirement home), the Getty Center (up on the hill), Griffith Observatory (where the shuttle may produce dramatic photos against the city skyline below), or the historic inclusion of the Queen Mary and the airborne shuttle in Long Beach. Another cool place, if you can line-up the elements for your camera, is JPL in Pasadena.
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NASA also promises you'll see the shuttle over Malibu, Venice, and Huntington Beaches, and over Universal Studios and Disneyland.
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If you want to watch Endeavour make the final landing at about 12:45 pm, the El Segundo Police are blocking-off a pedestrian viewing zone on the 300-600 blocks of East Imperial Ave, and the 700 block of West Imperial Ave, beginning at 9 am. That area include Clutter's Park.
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SOME PERSPECTIVE
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Competition among museums to land a shuttle was brisk. Endeavour is the only one coming to the West Coast.
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It's been an amazing year for historic preservation in L.A., a city long known for building everything with stucco because it's easier to tear-down.
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And it isn't just preservation for the sake of history or education or nostalgia. Big and famous objects bring economic benefits of tourism, and that spreads to restaurants, hotels, souvenir vendors, and more.
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Already here to greet Endeavour when she flies over is the USS Iowa, one of the world's last battleships, which docked at her new display home in San Pedro in July. She now welcomes visitors daily, as Endeavour will, soon.
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The shuttle will become the newest chief attraction at the California Science Center in Exposition Park. The 12-mile journey to get there will be made through city streets from LAX, October 12 & 13. Controversy over tree removal to enable the move is being resolved by the planting of many more trees that the number that will be lost.
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It's a bittersweet homecoming for Endeavor in Southern California. All the orbiters were built here. Each made returns to the final assembly plant in Palmdale, atop the 747, when major upgrades were needed. Now, the US manned space program has no launch or flight capabilities and is dependent on Russia to get to and from the orbiting space station.
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Still, Southern California remains one of the nation's space meccas, with the presence of Elon Musk's new Space X, and the enduring role of the NASA / Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory - JPL - in Pasadena. The former just sent a cargo vessel to the space station. The latter is controlling the robotic "Curiosity" Mars Science Laboratory / rover and its two-year mission that's just getting underway, to look for evidence of life on Mars. Alas, these days, robots are as good as it gets.
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The Space Shuttle was the end of the US manned space program that began with six solo Mercury flights, moved on to develop space rendezvous and docking capabilities with Gemini, and climaxed with Apollo's nine voyages to the moon, including six landings and surface explorations by twelve human beings. The Shuttles followed, launching and repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, building the International Space Station (ISS), and bringing us brutal awareness of the cost of touching the unknown, with the losses of Challenger and Columbia. The Shuttles, through the devoted people in the program, also revealed a spirited astronaut corps and a scientific community that both say we must keep going.
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The recent death of Apollo 11 mission commander Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on another celestial object, is an ironic congruence marking the end of America's manned space flight capability.
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Today, we hear droning demands from politicians shouting for austerity in a time of scarcity, defeats of jobs bills, cutbacks of education and the arts and sciences, and of everything but the military - even as the do-nothing Congress begins another seven-week vacation this weekend.
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Perhaps the Endeavour, even as a silent display, will cause those who gaze upon her to remember a time when demanding less was not acceptable, and encourage us to more expansive aspirations and a prompt return to the heavens. One can hope.
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The Acoustic Americana Music Guide presents news and views of interest to people in the arts, and publishes daily update s and weekly full editions of its "Spotlight Events" edition, listing and describing acoustic and Americana music events in Southern California and music festivals in these music genres everywhere.
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