Bad weather in Florida lead to a California landing for the space shuttle Discover on October 24, 2000. This should happen more often in my opinion. About 2000 people converged to the public viewing area on the base. [Just how do you get VIP viewing?] The folks at Edwards are nice enough to let you on base, so I'm not complaining as the view from off base would be pretty poor.
This is the how the shuttle first appears, high in the sky. Note the plane is approaching from the west. The double sonic boom occurs around this time as well.
The shuttle had to do a U-turn before landing. For a vehicle not designed for maneuverability, it did a pretty tight turn.
If you look at the sequence of photos, you can see the shuttle begins to "nose up" as it lands, rather than making a 3-point landing. I ran across an explanation of this on usenet, and have republished it with the author's permission:
It's aerodynamic braking. We use it in high performance airplanes all the
time. The touchdown speeds of some of these airplanes leaves a very narrow
envelope between the max tire speed and the touchdown speed.
If you have the room, it's SOP to rotate the nose to a positive pitch angle
and let the speed drop off to a low roar before the application of brakes.
In the T38 for example, it's about 10 degrees on the pitch ladder of the
ADI. The tail AOA is there, it's just very subtle to catch with the naked
eye in some aircraft. As for the aerodynamic braking, it's a balancing act.
You want to keep the nose up, but not too high, and not too long. Again in
the T38, you touch down with the indexer on speed,(green donut) or 130kts
plus fuel, then hold the nose up and let it bleed off to about 100kts before
letting the nose settle in on the runway. The shuttle is doing basically the
same thing except to slightly different parameters.
Dudley Henriques
International Fighter Pilots Fellowship
Commercial Pilot/Certificated Flight Instructor
Retired
This was the last view the general public got of the shuttle. It remained behind this building.
NASA insured that all viewers were 1200ft from the runway.
Antennas near the viewing area. On the right tower is a vertical array of aircraft band discones. In the lower left corner are two circularly polarized antennas typically used for satellite reception.
Scanner traffic from the Endeavour shuttle landing on 6/19/2002. At this particular landing, visitors were not allowed on the base. Of course, none of the public knew this ahead of time and it was quite a mess.