Peninsula Daily News and The Associated Press
SEATTLE — The Museum of Flight next to Boeing Field is so optimistic that it might be home to a mothballed shuttle that it will host the live TV feed of the NASA announcement Tuesday.
The odds are not good: Twenty other museums and science and visitor centers around the country — including Florida, Texas and California, locales that were vital to the shuttle program — are vying for one of NASA’s three retiring spaceships.
They’ll find out Tuesday on the 30th anniversary of Columbia’s maiden voyage.
The Museum of Flight, 9404 E. Marginal Way S., will watch the 10 a.m. announcement, then hold a news conference with museum officials, including retired astronaut Bonnie Dunbar, who flew on five shuttle missions.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr., a former shuttle commander, is making the final decision, with input from a committee.
He’ll announce the winners while marking the 30-year anniversary at Kennedy Space Center, NASA’s launch and landing site and the front-runner in the nab-a-shuttle race.
Snagging Discovery, Atlantis or Endeavour for display doesn’t come cheap. NASA puts the tab at $28.8 million, down from $42 million from last year.
One space shuttle is already spoken for — the Smithsonian Institution will get Discovery, NASA’s oldest and most traveled shuttle, which ended its flying career last month.
It will go to the National Air and Space Museum’s hangar in Virginia and take the place of Enterprise, the shuttle prototype used for tests in the late 1970s.
That frees up Enterprise for another museum, so there will be three other winners — a 1-in-7 chance.
One of the positives for the museum next to Boeing Field: The Enterprise and other space shuttles were transported terrestrially on specially configured 747s made by Boeing.
The shuttles were manufactured by companies now owned by Boeing, though in California.
Boeing Field, Museum of Flight officials noted, has a sufficiently long runway on which to land the 747 that would carry an orbiter to Seattle.
The Museum of Flight, which already has the first jet version of Air Force One and a supersonic Concorde plus most every Boeing aircraft model ever made, broke ground in June on a space-gallery building that could house a shuttle.
The state’s legislative delegation in Washington, D.C., regardless of party, is together on the campaign to bring a mothballed shuttle to Seattle.
In a letter to NASA boss Bolden and signed by Sens. Patty Murray, D-Bothell, and Maria Cantwell, D-Mountlake Terrace, and all of Washington’s Republican and Democratic Congress members led by senior Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Belfair, whose district includes the North Olympic Peninsula:
“The Museum of Flight is a source of pride to all of us in Washington state, and we are confident that no other facility in the world can match the museum’s ability to preserve and utilize an orbiter in a manner befitting its historical importance.”
“We have our fingers crossed,” Dicks said this week.
But the competition is great.
The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, which includes Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and shuttle displays — including a mock shuttle in which the public can go aboard — also has a rocket “garden,” a shuttle simulation ride, bus tours along the huge shuttle hangars and related attractions in which a real shuttle would fit in.
The Johnson Space Center in Houston — the command center for the shuttle missions — gives Texas an edge.
Former President George W. Bush personally has lobbied President Barack Obama for a shuttle to go to the Lone Star State.
California, with the nation’s largest state delegation to Congress, yields considerable influence, too.
An online April Fools’ Day prank had one of the shuttles going to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles as the result of a multimillion-dollar donation by a former student who became a “Star Trek” TV star.
Other hot contenders are the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio; the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City; and Adler Planetarium in Chicago.
NASA originally had four space shuttles.
Challenger was destroyed during liftoff in 1986, and Endeavour was built as a replacement.
Then, Columbia was lost in 2003 and was not replaced.
Columbia was the first to fly April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the world’s first spaceman.
Tuesday will mark the 50th anniversary of the late cosmonaut’s flight.
Endeavour is set to soar to the International Space Station late this month, then Atlantis will close out the shuttle program with a June or July liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center.
The $28.8 million price tag to acquire a mothballed orbiter is based on NASA’s estimate for transporting a shuttle from Kennedy to a major U.S. airport atop the modified 747 and for displaying it indoors in a climate-controlled building.
