Everyone is breathing a sigh of relief that the space shuttle has successfully landed. The landing was a beautiful spectacle.
Poking around on Youtube, I found something equally spectacular. This is a short clip of the method for getting the shuttle from place to place down here on the planet: it rides piggyback on a 747.
I saw that years ago when a shuttle visited Holland. Fun thing was that I and a few others had set up at a well known but small outlook post in the dunes west of Amsterdam. The 747+shuttle combo did a 360 around us (covering Haarlem and Zandvoort) before continuing its journey. Quite a sight!
Amazing yes…but also awkward. I've always thought that was a weak, wasteful link in the shuttle process. Don't know what the answer should be, but that just seems like a cobbled together solution to the gnarly problem of getting the shuttle back where it belongs.