This may have been discussed before, but considering that the first three shuttles built were (in order) Columbia, Challenger, and Discovery can anybody tell me why the hell they chose Discovery for the "return to flight" mission?
Discovery was "out of commission" during the Columbia disaster and had been since September 2002. It was out of commission because they were completely overhauling it from the ground up... the official term is Orbiter Maintenance Down Period (OMDP). They replaced millions of feet in wires, new computers, system boards, the works... making it the most state of the art shuttle left in the fleet. http://www.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle/f_omdp1.html
does anyone still have these saved that they could re-post for me? thanks in advance. (thanks again to you, MR.MEOWGI, for an awesome desktop!)
