Question: what is your favorite time someone went to space

Duncan McNicholl answered on 6 Nov 2017:

I had to go and look up some flight numbers for this, but STS-125. There are a couple of reasons I picked this one: first of all it was the last flight to the Hubble Space Telescope, one of my top three things in space (the other two are Kepler and the Voyager probes). This was the last time that they switched out the instruments and replaced the moving parts so that it could continue to take pictures, something that it’s still doing today. It’s been taking some of the coolest pictures of the universe since before you were born, back in 1990.
The other reason that STS-125 was awesome was because it happened in an era when NASA were quite nervous about using the space shuttle, because there had been a terrible accident in 2003 with the Columbia, and seven astronauts had died. Instead of letting their nervousness stop them from flying the shuttle, they just did extra planning, and had back-up plans in case something went wrong while they were in orbit. Mostly those plans were “go find the International Space Station”, because stranded astronauts could live there for a couple of weeks while NASA sorted out another shuttle to come and get them, but the Hubble and the ISS are really far apart almost all the time, so the Atlantis wouldn’t have been able to get there if there’d been a problem. That meant that NASA had to have another shuttle, Endeavor, standing by and ready to go if they needed it. It takes so long to get a shuttle ready to fly that it was there on the launch pad when Atlantis took off: there are amazing pictures of the two shuttles on launch pads just next to each other. Thankfully, STS-125 went without a hitch and everybody was completely safe.