I don’t have a record of which shuttle this was, which flight; I’m not even sure of the date. The shuttles landed on a big dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, 100 miles or so north of LA. Since the shuttles usually landed in the morning, people would arrive to see it the afternoon before, lining up in a makeshift parking lot several miles from where the shuttle would touch down.
In the morning, the time from spotting the shuttle high in the sky, to its landing miles away, was perhaps five minutes. And it all happened in utter silence, since the shuttle glided without any kind of engine power. And then everyone got in their vehicles and crept slowly out the one road — that would have been Rosamond Blvd., east of Highway 14 at Rosamond — to drive home.
