Credit: NASA

After carrying that heavy thing around for years and years, this is how they treat Seattle?

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  • NASA

That ain’t tight. That ain’t right.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

17 replies on “Re: So…. We Didn’t Get the Space Shuttle”

  2. I hear from a local aerospace person that having the training module might be “better” from an educational standpoint. Rumor has it that you wont be able to go in the real shuttles, and they need to be significantly decontaminated (from what I don’t know) but the trainers should be open to the public to go inside and tour. A lame prize, but something nonetheless.

  4. I think they went for maximum exposure & geographic distribution.
    Florida & Smithsonian, obviously.
    NY and LA, for the people.

    Houston, along with the rest of Texas, is a fetid cloaca.

  5. @2 – on second thought, a training module would actually be cool—provided it’s still looks like a space shuttle. A shuttle that never went to space, but kids can explore, is way better than a radioactive Life Force-style contaminated one, viewed from behind the ropes.

    I loved those old rocket capsules they had at the Seattle Center when I was a kid. I could’ve flipped those switches for hours.

    This reminds me… anyone here always wished they could’a gone to Space Camp? Don’t. A good friend of mine went and it apparently sucked. That needed to be said.

  6. Yeah, I don’t know about the trainer being a lame consolation prize, but an actual shuttle would not have made much of a display.

    I’ve seen the shuttle at the Air & Space museum near Dulles, and you can’t do anything more than stand and look at the outside of it. You can’t touch it. You can’t go inside. It was a bit of a letdown actually seeing it for real. But it does draw in a lot of visitors, which was what the Boeing museum probably wanted.

  7. I remember that capsule from the science center. I too loved it and always hatted having to get out for some other kid to get her/his turn.

    I think that the trainer is cool in that you can actually get inside unlike the real thing. I hope that this simulator is going to be working instead of just one where you sit in it for a few seconds then the jerk kid behind you cries to mommy that you’ve had your turn and now it’s his.

    I’ve been to the Cape many times (latest in Dec. 2010) and loved looking at the giant rockets. But that was all you could do was look and not touch. KSC now has a shuttle where you can get inside. Though your still looking through glass.

  9. @5/7:

    There used to be an old Gemini mock-up in the lobby of the new IMAX at PSC, don’t know if it’s still there though.

    @2:

    Shuttles absorb a lot of nasty substances over time: hard radiation (as @5 notes), toxic gases from the cooling and maneuvering systems and from heating those ceramic tiles over-and-over during re-entry, etc., etc.

    The only real surprise in the selections, IMO, was “Enterprise” going to The Intrepid Museum in NYC. While setting a space shuttle down on the deck of an aircraft carrier sounds cool, their overall collection is pretty lame compared to places like Seattle, Houston, Tulsa, Kansas City, Dayton, et al. BUT, it does have the advantage of a huge population from which to attract visitors, so I can kind of understand the rationale.

  12. The conversation, almost certainly, went much like this:

    “Well, we need one in the Northeast, obviously. New York is good. And you know, our nation’s capital should also get one. Now where else? Well, all the tourists go to Florida, so let’s put one there. And oh yeah, the West Coast. Is there anything out there west of the Mississippi but California? Probably not…OK, let’s put it there.”

  17. All of the shuttles were built in California, in Los Angeles County (Palmdale). Other than the carrier, Boeing didn’t have a connection until its buying spree of 1996. That hasn’t worked out so well for CA aerospace.

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