Shuttling down

29 years after the first launch, the era of the Space Shuttle is drawing to a close, with two launches remaining before the system is retired.

It is still a marvel able to impress though. I came across this video recently showing just a tiny part of what each launch involves:

Time lapse of Shuttle being prepared for launch (link)

For all our modern faults, its pretty wondrous to me that we live in an age where something like this can be taken for granted. The bit where the gantry picks the shuttle up, rotates it and moves it up, down and around blows my mind. I know that building is big (it was built to assemble the Saturn V rockets for the Apollo moon missions), but to see it illustrated like this shows you just how big.