Should the city of Houston, which proudly regards itself as 'Space City', have a valued space -shuttle orbiter on public display?
More than ten years ago the answer was yes. The Space Shuttle program was finally managed by Johnson Space Center, in southeastern Houston. All astronauts who flew on the shuttle trained there. And the vehicle was operated from mission control in the facility established in Houston.
But when the last decisions were made to distribute the shuttles 15 years ago, the community in Houston dragged its feet in compiling a competitive proposal. There were also questions about the possibility of Space Center Houston to collect the financing to accommodate the shuttle in a new display area, which increase the concern that would be left behind the historic vehicle, just like a Saturn V rocket, outside the damp environment of the region. Finally, other cities offered better proposals for displaying the shuttles to the public.
Eventually the four shuttles were sent to museums in Washington, DC, New York, Florida and California.
Bring it back home
And that was all more or less arranged until last week when the two American senators from Texas, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz submitted the “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act” to move Space Shuttle Discovery From the current location the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museums Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia to Houston.
The news site of Space Collectibles, Collectspace, has a good overview of why this movement is stupid impractical. In essence, it would easily cost $ 1 billion to put and move one of the two shuttle aircraft ships back into use Discovery, It is unclear where the shuttle could survive such a trip in its current state, and the Smithsonian is the most important museum of the nation. There is a reason that DiscoveryThe most historic of the three remaining shuttles that went to space was placed there.
After the senators had announced their bill, the collective reaction of the space community was initially shock. This was quickly followed by: Why? And so I spoke with different people in the background, both from the political and the space sailing, to get an idea of what really happens here. The short answer is that it is all political, and the timing is due to the re -election campaign for Cornyn, which is confronted with a rigid drainage against Ken Paxton.
