A Space Shuttle on the Streets of Los Angeles ⇥ theatlantic.com

The space shuttle Endeavour is on its last mission today, a 12-mile creep through Los Angeles city streets on a 160-wheeled carrier. It is passing through neighborhoods and strip malls, headed toward its final destination, the California Science Center in South Los Angeles.

If you’re any kind of a reasonable human being, you’ll switch this to the 1,280px-width format for these stunning photos.

Some may see this as the death of a massive human—pardon me for this—endeavour, but look at it another way: in 2012, a man ran in the Olympics with totally prosthetic legs and feet, another man broke the sound barrier by jumping from over 38 kilometres above the planet, a team of scientists from all around the world flung a car packed with science from Earth to Mars, and another team discovered a particle with similar properties to the Higgs boson. All this has happened in the past 10 months.