Comments for "Launch of Columbia on First Space Shuttle Mission, STS-1" Video at VideoSift.com

By choggie

choggie (http://www.videosift.com/member/choggie) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 23:22:05 -0700

looks like an old Atari game....like the international space station does now...

By jonny

jonny (http://www.videosift.com/member/jonny) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 15:03:24 -0700

*requeue

By siftbot

siftbot (http://siftbot.videosift.com) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 15:03:24 -0700

Re-queueing this video for one more try; last queued Saturday, September 1st, 2007 1:20am PDT - requeue requested by submitter jonny.

By ant

ant (http://www.videosift.com/member/ant) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:52:34 -0700

Why was it so white before and these days with colors?

By jonny

jonny (http://www.videosift.com/member/jonny) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:01:15 -0700

Why was it so white before and these days with colors?

I'm not really sure. And I probably should know since they build those tanks about 30 miles from where I grew up. My best guess is that they changed the foam material in which the tanks are encased after the test missions. I looked for other archive photos to see if the other 3 test missions had white external tanks. Could only find the 4th and it did. The next photo I could find was many missions later, so I'm not sure when it changed over.

By drattus

drattus (http://www.videosift.com/member/drattus) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:22:44 -0700

It's just a matter of a bit of paint on the early ones. They were painted white, at some point they decided they could save 600 pounds by leaving it with just the primer. Later they redesigned so had a difference there. Wiki has a fairly good history of them here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle_external_tank#Evolution_of_the_ET