Published: April 12, 2011
NASA’s space shuttles, which have been carrying astronauts aloft for 30 years, were assigned to their final destinations on Tuesday: one will head to the nation’s capitol, another to Los Angeles, and the third from its current home at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the center’s visitor complex down the road.
At a ceremony at Kennedy commemorating the shuttle program, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, made the long-awaited announcement of where the soon-to-be museum pieces would end up.
The Discovery, which completed its final flight last month, is headed to the Smithsonian, for display at the spacious Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport. The Endeavour, currently on the launching pad for its final space trip, will go to the California Science Center. The Atlantis, scheduled for its last mission in June, will go to the Kennedy visitor complex.
With the Discovery headed to the Smithsonian, the museum will no longer have need for the Enterprise, the shuttle that has been on display there since 2004. The Enterprise, which was used for early glide tests but was never sent into orbit, will now go the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan.
Conspicuous among the unsuccessful hopefuls were NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the site of mission control for the 135 shuttle missions, and the Museum of Flight in Seattle, which had already begun construction of a new wing that it hoped would house an orbiter.
Twenty-one institutions across the country put in bids for one of the orbiters, and in recent weeks, General Bolden was inundated with letters and phone calls from members of Congress and others advocating various sites.
General Bolden said the decision was his alone. “This process has been as pure as I could make it and free of any political involvement,” he said during testimony at a Senate hearing on Monday. “I can say that until I am blue in the face, but there will always be someone who will have the opinion that that was not the case.”
NASA had been expected to make its museum choices last year, but that was when the last shuttle flight had been scheduled for last September. As the schedule for the final missions was stretched out, so were the preparations for the shuttles’ post-flying careers.
Finally, General Bolden chose Tuesday for the announcement to coincide with the anniversaries of two historic moments in space flight: the 50th anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who was the first human in space, and the 30th anniversary of the first launching of a space shuttle, the Columbia, in 1981.
Two shuttles — and the astronauts aboard — were lost in the past 30 years. The Challenger disintegrated during its launching in January 1986, because of hot gases leaking out of one of its solid rocket boosters, which led to failure of the external fuel tank. Seventeen years later, the Columbia was lost as it returned to Earth because of damage to its wing caused by falling foam during liftoff.
In the aftermath of Columbia, President George W. Bush decided to resume flying the three remaining shuttles — the Discovery, the Atlantis, and the Endeavour, which had been built as a replacement for the Challenger — but then to retire them as soon as construction of the International Space Station was complete.
NASA inquired a few years ago if any museums or other institutions had an interest in acquiring a shuttle. Potential bidders were told that educational programs would have to accompany the exhibits, and that the shuttles would have to reside in an indoor, climate-controlled environment.
The winning institutions will now have to negotiate with NASA over the cost, estimated at $28.8 million apiece, of preparing the shuttles for display and moving them to their destinations. But not all of them will have to find that much money: Congress exempted the Smithsonian, and the transportation costs for the Kennedy Space Center visitor complex, literally down the road, will be significantly lower.
NASA’s space shuttles, which have been carrying astronauts aloft for 30 years, were assigned to their final destinations on Tuesday: one will head to the nation’s capitol, another to Los Angeles, and the third from its current home at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the center’s visitor complex down the road.
At a ceremony at Kennedy commemorating the shuttle program, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, made the long-awaited announcement of where the soon-to-be museum pieces would end up.
The Discovery, which completed its final flight last month, is headed to the Smithsonian, for display at the spacious Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport. The Endeavour, currently on the launching pad for its final space trip, will go to the California Science Center. The Atlantis, scheduled for its last mission in June, will go to the Kennedy visitor complex.
With the Discovery headed to the Smithsonian, the museum will no longer have need for the Enterprise, the shuttle that has been on display there since 2004. The Enterprise, which was used for early glide tests but was never sent into orbit, will now go the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan.
Conspicuous among the unsuccessful hopefuls were NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the site of mission control for the 135 shuttle missions, and the Museum of Flight in Seattle, which had already begun construction of a new wing that it hoped would house an orbiter.
Twenty-one institutions across the country put in bids for one of the orbiters, and in recent weeks, General Bolden was inundated with letters and phone calls from members of Congress and others advocating various sites.
General Bolden said the decision was his alone. “This process has been as pure as I could make it and free of any political involvement,” he said during testimony at a Senate hearing on Monday. “I can say that until I am blue in the face, but there will always be someone who will have the opinion that that was not the case.”
NASA had been expected to make its museum choices last year, but that was when the last shuttle flight had been scheduled for last September. As the schedule for the final missions was stretched out, so were the preparations for the shuttles’ post-flying careers.
Finally, General Bolden chose Tuesday for the announcement to coincide with the anniversaries of two historic moments in space flight: the 50th anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who was the first human in space, and the 30th anniversary of the first launching of a space shuttle, the Columbia, in 1981.
Two shuttles — and the astronauts aboard — were lost in the past 30 years. The Challenger disintegrated during its launching in January 1986, because of hot gases leaking out of one of its solid rocket boosters, which led to failure of the external fuel tank. Seventeen years later, the Columbia was lost as it returned to Earth because of damage to its wing caused by falling foam during liftoff.
In the aftermath of Columbia, President George W. Bush decided to resume flying the three remaining shuttles — the Discovery, the Atlantis, and the Endeavour, which had been built as a replacement for the Challenger — but then to retire them as soon as construction of the International Space Station was complete.
NASA inquired a few years ago if any museums or other institutions had an interest in acquiring a shuttle. Potential bidders were told that educational programs would have to accompany the exhibits, and that the shuttles would have to reside in an indoor, climate-controlled environment.
The winning institutions will now have to negotiate with NASA over the cost, estimated at $28.8 million apiece, of preparing the shuttles for display and moving them to their destinations. But not all of them will have to find that much money: Congress exempted the Smithsonian, and the transportation costs for the Kennedy Space Center visitor complex, literally down the road, will be significantly lower.