*For best results play Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger while watching.

Earlier this week, space shuttle Discovery took its final flight, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to Dulles International Airport, on the back of a 747. That’s a space shuttle piggybacking on a jumbo jet, and it was awesome. Click through for the video.

The space shuttle in question is none other than NASA’s Discovery, the final nail in the coffin of the space shuttle program. First launched in 1984, Discovery completed 39 missions for NASA and racked up around 148 million miles while doing so. Oh, and it orbited Earth a 5830 times. Those days are now gone, and for its final flight it piggybacked on a 747.

As you might imagine, getting a space shuttle to piggyback on a jumbo jet is not nearly as simple as it sounds. For one thing, a 747 can’t bend over, nor can an almost three-ton space shuttle jump. That’s why NASA had to set up the enormous rig, seen in the video above, to bolt the retiree to its obliging carrier.

The modified 747 departed on Tuesday, just after dawn, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and landed safely at Dulles International Airport three hours later. From there it will be taken to its final resting place at a Smithsonian Institution exhibition hangar in Virginia. Below is a concise, informative video put together by National Geographic showing the final flight, which took it over Washington DC where thousands of onlookers gathered to bid a final farewell.

[Source: The Daily, YouTube]