Space Shuttle Endeavour's Tour of LA

Friday, September 21, 2012, was the day that the Space Shuttle Endeavour toured Southern California (and Northern California). My co-worker, Ryan, and I were half-heartedly conspiring to find the best locations and plan to see Endeavour flying overhead.

We went up to the top of the garage at our workplace to see if we could get a good view. We decided that the view may not be that great because there was a big building in the way. Instead we decided to head to the top of Baldwin Hills and Norman O. Houston Park. There were a number of people out to catch the flyover, but it wasn’t a huge crowd.

I was following #spottheshuttle on Twitter to see if I could track its movements. We must have looked like Space Shuttle experts out there with the big telephoto lens because we got several questions about when it was going to fly over. Someone was asking that question and then all of a sudden there was screaming coming from the elementary school above the park and the guy asking the questions said, “there it is!” We swung around to look and find the Shuttle flying almost directly overhead.

We took a few more pictures as it flew over the park.

Our plan was to try to see Endeavour from a few different angles. We were the Shuttle Stalkers. We hopped in the car and drove south on La Brea. We had gotten about a mile from the park when we see Endeavour flying across in front of us. We weren’t sure if they were landing prematurely so we furiously searched Twitter for any news. We still planned on finding a good place closer to the airport.

Our first plan was to go to a park just east of Sepulveda near La Tijera. We got there and took a look around. Ryan knew from vast research that the Shuttle was actually landing on the south runway, which was the furthest runway from where we were at. We saw a plane that was landing a little to the south and it disappeared behind some of the hotels on Century Blvd. We decided that our location probably wouldn’t be a good one.

We started to drive closer to the airport and as expected it started to become a madhouse. There were a lot of people out and a lot of cars. We drove east down Century to see if we could find a parking spot so we could get out and walk to find a good view. We couldn’t find anywhere legal to park so we turned south and eventually west and found ourselves back to Aviation, which we believed would be the epicenter of it all.

I was hoping to avoid Aviation and Imperial because I thought there would be too much traffic and people to get around. There were a lot of people, but the traffic wasn’t too bad. We didn’t quite expect the huge throngs of people that were there.

As we drove down Aviation, we could also see traffic backed up on the 105 and people standing on top of the 105, probably fifty feet up, trying to get a view. We were fortunately driving slow enough that at some point I looked to my left (we were driving south on Aviation) and see the shuttle with its escorts making a turn to go to the airport. Earlier as we were driving, we saw a lot of motorcycle cops and didn’t dare stop in the “No Parking” zone. We had passed the last noticeable motorcycle cop at the point when I saw the shuttle that I decided to pull over, open the window and take a few pictures. Ryan got out to look from the side of the road. While he was out there, I was really hoping that we wouldn’t get stopped by a motorcycle cop, but they were too busy gawking at the shuttle.

We decided for scientific-curiosity-sake to drive down Imperial just to see if there were any crowds and also to see if we could spot the shuttle on the runway. We took a right onto Imperial and to our surprise there was no traffic. We could see a lot of people standing around and on the tops of the buildings. When we got just past Sepulveda, we realized that we were entering a point-of-no-return where we might just get stuck in gridlock.

We drove very slowly and saw thousands of people hanging out on the side of the road and hanging over the 105 Freeway. I was a little worried at this point because my car said I only had about 23 miles worth of gas in the car. I wasn’t worried enough because I decided that we should make a U-turn to see the craziness of people lining Imperial. There must have been tens of thousands of people at the top of Imperial Hill.

When we made it almost back to Sepulveda, we got a good view of the craziness. There were tons of people on the side of the freeway. There were tons of people on the freeway! The highway patrol actually closed the entrance to the 105, probably because so many pedestrians were standing on it.