Endeavor: Now and Then

In this educational 'Liftoff to Learning' video series, astronauts from STS-49 Space Shuttle Mission (Thomas Akers, Bruce Melnick, Pierre Thuot, Kathy Thornton, Kevin Chilton, and Richard Hieb) compare their mission aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor and their shuttle with its namesake, the ship 'Endeavor', commanded by Captain James Cook of England in the late 1700's. Using historical paintings, drawings, and computer graphics, Cook's Endeavor is brought to life. Its voyage path, problems, biological experiments, and discoveries are shown and compared to the modern-day Endeavor, its mission and experiments. The Space Shuttle Endeavor was named in 1988, through a nation-wide school contest. It is the fifth Space Shuttle to be built and employs new technology in its design, for example, its drag shoot for shuttle landings. One part of the STS-49 Mission was the retrieval of the Intel satellite.