But as Space Shuttle Discovery was towed the 3.5 miles to Cape Canaveral last night there was a bittersweet, almost funereal, air to proceedings.
The old workhorse of Nasa’s fleet, this will be Discovery’s final mission before it is finally retired and becomes a museum piece.
Lit up against the night sky, the shuttle was watched by crowds of shuttle workers and their families as it took its last ride to the pad on top of a giant transporter.
Flight to International Space Station will be voyage No.39 for old timer
Several hundred contract employees will lose their jobs on October 1st in a continuing wave of layoffs after the shuttle programme was shelved by the Obama administration.
Nasa only has two missions remaining with Discovery due to lift off for the International Space Station on November 1.
Endeavour will follow in February to wrap up 30 years of shuttle flight.
In Discovery’s 38 flights it has completed completed 5,247 orbits, and has spent 322 days in orbit, It has also flown more flights than any of the other shuttles, including four in 1985.
It was also the shuttle which was the first to fly after the 1986 Challenger disaster and 2003 Columbia disaster.
The future of manned spaceflight is uncertain because of disagreement in Washington over where future missions should fly.
Technicians are readying the payload for space shuttle Discovery's next mission, STS-133. The flight to the International Space Station is due to deliver supplies and equipment to the orbiting laboratory complex inside the Permanent Multipurpose Module.
The PMM was modified from a multi-purpose logistics module that was built as a reusable module to haul experiment racks and other materials to and from the space station.
The module will be left behind so it can be used for microgravity experiments in fluid physics, materials science, biology and biotechnology.
Located on Merritt Island, just north of Cape Canaveral, the launch pads were originally built for the huge Apollo/Saturn V rockets that launched American astronauts on their historic journeys to the moon and back.
Following the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission of July 1975, the pads were modified to support space shuttle operations.
All of the shuttles are checked out and assembled in the protected environment of the Orbiter Processing Facility and the Vehicle Assembly Building, then transported by large, tracked crawlers to the launch pad for final processing and launch.
During the Apollo era, key pad service structures were mobile. For the space shuttle, two permanent service towers were installed at each pad for the first time, the fixed service structure and the rotating service structure.
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