We first reported on NASA’s eBay moment over a year ago, but the competition to land (or launch?) one of the remaining space shuttles is reaching a fever pitch leading up to an April 12 announcement.
The shuttles Endeavour, Atlantis, and Discovery are still up for grabs as 21 museums want to exhibit the space icons. The New York Times handicaps the race:
The visitor center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston hired a marketing firm and set up a Web site, bringtheshuttlehome.com. Houston, the marketers argue, is the location of NASA’s Mission Control, which guides the shuttles during flight.
The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan has collected more than 150,000 names on a petition urging that one of the shuttles be placed there. “New York City would make an ideal home for one of these retiring shuttles,” the campaign asserts, noting that the spacecraft would be “prominently displayed” on Pier 86 in Manhattan.
The Museum of Flight in Seattle has perhaps gone the furthest: this week, it erected the first wall of a new $12 million wing to house the shuttle it may never get. The museum’s “shuttle boosters” Web site argues that Seattle has “the right stuff” because the Boeing 747 was built there and 27 shuttle astronauts have called Washington home.
Other hopefuls include the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the launching site of all of the shuttle missions; the California Science Center in Los Angeles; and the Museum of the United States Air Force, near Dayton, Ohio, which got a boost from President Obama’s budget request for 2012 seeking $14 million to send a shuttle there.
One museum that has been mum is the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. But that is because NASA already offered it the Discovery three years ago, and most expect the Discovery will go there.
