When I first heard that Los Angeles had won the competition to house an orbiter at the science museum on Exposition Boulevard, I scratched my head, trying to imagine how they were going to get it there. At the Space Technology Expo, the museum had a booth, and I asked the young lady working there. “Oh, we’re still working it out.”
[shocked voice] “You didn’t have to submit a plan with the proposal?”
“No, not a detailed one.”
At the SpaceUp LA a couple weeks ago, we saw a description of the plan, using a very precision crawler, in which it was noted that a “few” trees might have to be removed.
Well, “a few” has turned into four hundred mature trees, and the locals, justifiably, aren’t happy about it. I wonder how much support the project would have gotten if they’d known this up front?
Anyway, one of the amusing things about the LA Times piece is the technical ignorance on display:
Several alternatives for the Oct. 12 move were considered but ultimately discarded.
Taking the massive shuttle apart would have damaged the delicate tiles that acted as heat sensors.
Ummmm…no.
The tiles are not “heat sensors.” They are heat protectors, insulating the vehicle from the hot plasma of entry. The heat must be shielded against, not just “sensed.”
Taking off the tiles isn’t that difficult, but most were removed destructively for maintenance. When a tile was meant to kept, the nearby tiles were destroyed, and the keeper tile was removed in a keel haul type fashion.
I suspect what they mean by “taking apart” would mean removing the wings from the fuselage. Good luck with that, tiles or no tiles.
Removing the wings from the fuselage is trivial with a chain saw, and could probably be done faster and cheaper than cutting just one tree along a busy street.
It’s not like the wing will ever need to meet any structural requirements anymore, and the skin damage will be hidden by fake replacement tiles.
The Mythbusters crew could cut the Shuttle’s wings off, move it, and reattach them with some aluminum plates bolted to the spars and some riveted sheet over the cuts, all in one episode. It’s not going into the Smithsonian, and no one will ever take it out for a test hop again.
By the time it makes its way through Crenshaw, MLK, and where ever else they’re hauling it, isn’t it going to end up stripped and sitting on cinder-blocks anyway?
And all the tiles say “Ouch!”
And frankly, who cares if they damaged the heat sensors that are mounted at various points around the Shuttle? It’s not like it’s going to re-enter again.
But instead of picking a route where they would have to cut up concrete, which can be repoured in a day, they decided to kill hundreds of big trees that take decades to mature. What a typical big-government plan.
I’d remove the SSME’s to drop the weight to 176,000 lbs, then use four Mi-26 helicopters which have a lifting capacity of 44,000 lbs each.
One of the things about the Princess Diana tragedy was that the news cut into regular programming and I never found out if Astronaut “Bull” Eckert, the Corbin Bernsen character, ever made it safely back on a Shuttle with tile damage on the cliff-hanger episode of the 1996 TV show “The Cape.”
I was following that show, guess there was nothing better to watch, but it was interesting seeing Corbin Bernsen as a tough Air Force colonel turned head NASA astronaut in contrast with his unethical divorce lawyer character on L.A. Law.
I thought they would play that episode on TV again some time later to make up for the news flash on the terrible thing that happened to Diana, but it seemed that “The Cape” went off the air after that. Do you think the TV series ended with a fictional Shuttle disaster involving the tiles, and after the real-life tragedy, the local TV station (it was one of those non-network programs) didn’t want to show it?
I’d remove the SSME’s to drop the weight to 176,000 lbs, then use four Mi-26 helicopters which have a lifting capacity of 44,000 lbs each.
The SSME’s are already replica, but yeah, they could install them later. They could also move the RCS pods (OMS and FRCS) to shed some more weight.
How about a tail-first vertical landing using the RCS thrusters? Wouldn’t that make a kewl You-Tube video! And then you could also evacuate the neighborhood until Hazmat determined that the Mono-methyl hydrazine and Nitrogen tetroxide fumes have diminished to safe levels . . .
I thought about that, but knowing NASA, the necessary hardware and software modifications, along with the test program, would suck up all the funding from SLS – which is sucking up all the funding from the Webb Telescope – which is sucking up all the funding from [begin infinite recursion].
The common sense solution is to leave Endeavor at LAX and build the museum around it, or make it the featured attraction of some concourse or terminal, perhaps with a Cinnabon and Starbucks in the payload bay. More people would see it there than where they’re taking it.
I would just leave it parked along some little used taxiway at LAX and paint “Aegean Airlines” on it for amusement value. ( or maybe “Air Greece”, because “Aegean” probably wouldn’t trigger for most of the public )
The common sense solution is to leave Endeavor at LAX and build the museum around it
More logical would have been to fly Endeavor to Palmdale, where it was built, and make it a museum piece there. Had they thought in advance (2008), they could have left in place the Orbiter Lifting Fixture taking care of the demate issue.
Displaying it in the middle of the desert, in a town no one visits, is not my definition of logical.
Even Houston’s proposal, as weak as it was, would be better than that.
Displaying it in the middle of the desert, in a town no one visits, is not my definition of logical.
Hey, its California, they think spending billions of dollars on high speed rail between two small population centers is logical. At least Palmdale is closer to the high speed rail.
BTW, I seem to recall someone saying, around the time of announcement, that LA won because they had a plan and Houston didn’t. Houston has already moved its replica shuttle into place without difficulty in nearly the manner I described at the time.
Leland, Leland, Leland…
Give it up. The replica is in place — outdoors. The actual orbiters must be hangared; they cannot be stored outdoors.
The replica came in by barge. Space Center Houston’s plan for the actual orbiter was not to move it by barge. It was to fly it to Ellington Field and put it in long-term storage pending construction of a future building. Moving the orbiter by barge was purely in your imagination.
And while the replica is “in place,” it’s not ready to receive visitors. Space Center Houston says it needs $1.8 million to make it ready.
So instead of a real orbiter which you can’t afford to display, you got a mockup which you can’t afford to display. Obviously, the government is out to get you. Life is hard all over.
LOL! Here’s a thought Ed, you were wrong. Just admit it. LA got the Orbiter for political reasons, same as NYC. It had nothing to do with plans, as you claimed then and now. For example:
It was to fly it to Ellington Field and put it in long-term storage pending construction of a future building. Moving the orbiter by barge was purely in your imagination
Except its exactly how they moved Enterprise. And oh yeah, they moved Enterprise, and then built an inflatable hanger around it. So much for that nonsense of plans being required, and that moving by barge is my imagination alone.
But hey, keep digging. It’s hilarious.
LA got the Orbiter for political reasons, same as NYC.
Duh. Of course they got it for political reasons. The decision was made by the government. Politics is what governments do.
Houston got Johnson Space Center for political reasons. The Shuttle got built for political reasons. The Shuttle got retired for political reasons. So what? People only complain about politicians being “political” when they don’t get what they want.
Except its exactly how they moved Enterprise. And oh yeah, they moved Enterprise, and then built an inflatable hanger around it.
For a different value of “they.”
You’re committing the “Black Swan” fallacy. *One* museum moved *one* orbiter by barge. That does not prove that *every* museum* planned to move *every* orbiter by barge.
No one at Space Center Houston proposed to move an orbiter to Houston by barge. That was simply wishful thinking on your part.
I didn’t say SCH proposed to move the Orbiter by barge, although that’s exactly how they, like NYC, moved their display item. That I claimed Houston proposed that or that I believe Houston deserved an Orbiter is an assertion made by you. I’ve never said such things. What I did was refuse to believe your nonsense that LA got an Orbiter because they had a plan and others did not, or that Houston could not possibly have gotten an Orbiter to Space Center Houston. I stated how it could be done, and hey, they changed their plan and used… a barge.
No, I never said “Houston could not possibly have gotten an Orbiter to Space Center Houston.”
I said they would have had to transport it down the road from Ellington — which is how SCH proposed to do it — and that would have been harder than simply barging an orbiter up the East River.
It was *New York* you were whining about back then, not LA. LA doesn’t even *have* an East River.
Handwaving about “how it could be done” is irrelevant, because that was not the proposal Houston submitted.
If you don’t believe Houston deserved an orbiter, what exactly is it that you’re whining about?
Here’s a thought for you, Leland. For what it would cost to move an orbiter and display it, you could probably acquire a Lynx and locate it at Ellington Field.
Then, Houston would have a spaceship that actually flies instead of one that used to fly.
That assumes you can raise the money, of course. But if you can’t do that, all of your complaining is irrelevant.
They could make Palmdale into the Mojave Space Museum and get visitors.
It’s not like it’s hours from LA in a vast, uncharted wasteland. It’s farkin’ Palmdale – an hour from downtown LA on route 14.
The common sense solution is to leave Endeavor at LAX and build the museum around it.
No, the common sense solution would have been for Endeavour to go to Houston or Dayton.
Houston didn’t deserve it (Dwayne Day at The Space Review had an interesting overview of how Houston treats its on-display space hardware), and Dayton…well, why should the AF have any special claim on it?
I think it’s great that it’s going to LA, where so much of it was designed and built.
The Air Force put up some of the STS development money (although it primarily went for upper stages rather than the Shuttle), built the SLC-6 Shuttle launch complex at VAFB, provided many of the astronauts, developed the T-38s used for astronaut training, provided security for Shuttle launches, provided weather support for Shuttle launches, operates the Eastern Test Range…
Right, no connection to the Shuttle program at all.
Use that Mars sky crane thingy to drop it in there.
We have a real nice landing strip and an good air museum at March Field.
I wonder what the height would be if you removed the tail? The freeway route was nixed because of a few overpasses that likely have 20′ of clearance.
There is a building at the Museum of Flight in Seattle that is just waiting for it. It is across the street from King County Airport. Take it off the 747 and roll it in. It will take about a day.
Not any more. The building built for the Shuttle is now occupied by the Shuttle full fuselage trainer.
I don’t think the MoF would trade now if they had the chance. The staff has come to realize that the full fuselage trainer is a better exhibit. Visitors are allowed in the cockpit, which couldn’t be done with the real orbiter. Also, because the FFT doesn’t have wings, there’s room for other exhibits including Charles Simonyi’s Soyuz capsule and the Blue Origin jet platform.
CHAIN SAW????!!!!! As a student of aviation history who follows aircraft restoration news on an almost daily basis, the very thought sent shudders up my spine and the sincere hopes that anyone who approaches this airframe with a chainsaw be met with the same results as that fellow long ago who went after one of them while it was being moved… I believe the guards shot him dead.