Space Shuttle Endeavour has bid farewell to the Space Coast.
Bolted to the top of NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a modified 747 built specifically for ferrying shuttles across the country, Endeavour departed the Kennedy Space Center at 7:22 a.m. EDT Wednesday, just after sunrise.
From there, it flew low over Cocoa Beach and south, turning back around at Patrick Air Force Base for one last, low flight over the Kennedy Space Center before heading west to its new, permanent home at a museum in Los Angeles.
NASA's youngest shuttle will make it as far as Houston on Wednesday. Endeavour is scheduled to arrive at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday. In mid-October, the shuttle will be transported down city streets to the California Science Center.
It was a bittersweet day on the Space Coast as hundreds of people -- astronauts, space center workers, tourists and journalists -- gathered at the Shuttle Landing Facility runway to bid Endeavour farewell following two days of rain delays.
Crowds also lined the beaches of Brevard County to catch one last glimpse of a space shuttle in the air as Endeavour swooped low overhead in one final show.
Onlookers waved, saluted, applauded and cheered as Endeavour made one last swoop over its old landing strip, and then aimed for the Gulf of Mexico.
"I am feeling a tremendous amount of pride," said astronaut Kay Hire, who flew aboard Endeavour two years ago aboard STS-130.
The shuttles have been tied to the Space Coast's communities and economy for more than three decades before the fleet was retired in 2011.
Endeavour's exit is another sign of the changing times on the Space Coast, where the end of the shuttle program last year resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs in Brevard County.
Others maybe excited for the future of manned space flight, and what it has in store for us on the Space Coast.
NASA retired the shuttle fleet under White House direction in order to focus more time and money on travel beyond Earth's orbit, first an asteroid and then Mars in the coming decades.
Private companies, meanwhile, are trying to pick up where NASA left off regarding the International Space Station, but until those businesses can provide spaceships for flying people, American astronauts can't launch from the Space Coast, having instead to rely on Russian rockets to get to the orbiting outpost.
Endeavour's journey west is NASA's last ferry flight for a space shuttle. Discovery made a similar final flight over the Space Coast in April before it headed north for the Smithsonian Institution, near Washington.
The last remaining shuttle, Atlantis, will remain at the Kennedy Space Center, where it will become a permanent display at the KSC Visitor Complex.
Endeavour flew 25 times in space, logging 123 million miles in orbit and circling Earth more nearly 4,700 times.