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As if they were performing delicate surgery, a crew inside the California Science Center museum hoisted a 3,000-pound portable space lab and storage pod inside the space shuttle Endeavour’s huge cargo bay Thursday, reuniting the retired orbiter with a piece of equipment it used on some missions over its two decades of flight.

By opening with no preamble, Stone put us into his soldiers’ boots: An aircraft cargo bay yawns wide to discharge “the cherries,” these achingly young soldiers, into the swirling, sulfurous dust of a Vietnam air base in 1967.

The cargo bay of a space shuttle was large enough to hold Hubble, which at 43.5 feet long and 14 feet wide is roughly the size of a school bus.

A few other accidents were caused by the pilot failing to balance the load in the cargo bay before takeoff, shifting the plane’s center of gravity.

At last she could see what the windowless cargo bay had hidden: the land crawling past with the illusory dawdle caused by altitude and parallax.