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Lawmakers Want a Space Shuttle In New York City
Hugh Pickens writes "Bloomberg reports that New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and a bipartisan delegation of 17 US representatives from New York and New Jersey have sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden calling for the agency to place a shuttle aboard the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City. A former aircraft carrier, Intrepid served as one of NASA's recovery vehicles for early space flights. Intrepid officials have gathered almost 57,000 signatures on a petition to bring an orbiter to New York, and NASA is weighing 21 bids from visitors' centers, science museums and educational institutions eager to host one of the three aging space shuttles that will be retired this year. 'These are going to be like the Mona Lisa,' says space historian John Logsdon, referring to Leonardo da Vinci's iconic 1506 portrait of a woman in Florence that remains on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. 'The primary criteria for the shuttles' location will be the stability of the site and whether the chosen institutions can exhibit them for the next 500 years.'"
Sure, why the hell not? There are plenty of Intrepid Space cadets in NYC.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
The Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinville, OR has a very nice collection of air and space exhibits. The "Spruce Goose," Howard Hughes' ill-fated wood composite transport plane, is on display there.
When the museum built a new hall, they designed it to hold a shuttle. The space isn't quite empty, but you can tell they really have a hole to fill.
I wonder what they'll do in what looks like the increasingly likely case that they won't get an orbiter? Maybe a Buran?
These are going to be like the Mona Lisa,' says space historian John Logsdon, referring to Leonardo da Vinci's iconic 1506 portrait of a woman in Florence that remains on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris
I'm glad he specified that. I wasn't sure what he was talking about with just a simple "Mona Lisa".
Several cities and domestic air museums have already made their bids, etc. more than a year ago. From Disney to Evergreen, everyone wanted either an airframe or an engine. Evergreen had billboards up for more than a year that have been taken down long since.
No one was interested when they saw the cost to transport, sanitize and decommission just one shuttle.
So what's happening now? Lawmakers= lobbiests for the NYC tourism board begging with the expectation the tax payers will foot the bill? A shuttle wouldn't last one year exposed to the elements on the deck of the Intrepid Sea. Might as well put them on Antiques Roadshow.
If anyone can afford it these days, it will be either Dubai or Shanghai.
If they set it up as well as they did the Concorde on the Pier next to the Intrepid. I was in NYC this summer and the Intrepid was one of the top highlights of the trip for me. I'll never get to fly on a Concorde - or a Space Shuttle - but at the Intrepid I could walk into and through one. While I couldn't sit in the all-first-class seating, I could at least see the inside in person. For me, that alone was worth the cost of admission. And if I could walk through a Space Shuttle, and see the controls and the loading bay, that would be worth twice that to me.
The two are in the top echelon of most important aircraft of the latter half of the 20th century. I think it should be a no-brainer to put them in the same museum.
And for those who haven't been there yet - the Concorde does not sit on the deck of the Intrepid, it is on the Pier next to it. I don't know if there is room on the Pier for a Space Shuttle, but I suspect the staff there would find room for something of that importance.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
'These are going to be like the Mona Lisa,' says space historian John Logsdon
Not really. Despite how much we like to think that we've advanced since 1969, we really haven't. I think the shuttle will be remembered like the Pentium 4, interesting, useful, but a technological dead end. Perhaps things would be different if America actually had a vision of space, but since the cold war ended we've had the worst of all worlds. Lack of willingness for the government to fund public spaceflights and lack of government cooperation for private spaceflight. Apollo will be remembered like the Mona Lisa, it was a large achievement in spaceflight. The shuttle? Unless something -major- comes out of the development of it, I think we will remember it more for Challenger and Columbia than anything else.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Headline provoked questions in your mind, you read on. I don't see the problem. Only thing a professional copy editor may have done is removed the word "a". Or, maybe something like NY Lawmakers vie for Space Shuttle.
Headlines are often supposed to leave a bit of mystery. Whether you like that or not is up to you, but it's unlikely to ever change as long as there are headlines.
meep
Why not put it somewhere that isn't nuclear terrorist target #1?
I really cannot think of why New York deserves one, the city made little to no real contribution to the Shuttle program. They are simply leveraging politics to get another tourist draw for nothing. That's not a good enough reason.
Instead of making one of the retiring orbiters a political kewpie doll, they should instead go to the following cities:
1) Kennedy Space Center.
It's where the launches and a large number of landings occurred, and that puts the spacecraft into context -- especially because there's a restored Saturn V hanging in the Apollo Center, the VAB and the launch pads are there, and a visitor will be able to see the launch site...not to mention ongoing space activities, whatever they are.
2) Houston
For many of the same reasons as KSC, Houston deserves an orbiter because it was the site of the bulk of training facilities, because it is the ongoing center for American manned space operations and because it too has a restored Saturn V to complement the orbiter.
3) The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum
This is the final resting place for most all of America's flighted space hardware, and an orbiter simply must join Apollo 11's capsule, the Mercury capsules, along with the other important space and aerospace artifacts. Yes, the Smithsonian currently has a flight-test body, but it could give that up in exchange for an orbiter.
Which in turn leads me to say that the Enterprise could go to New York, although I would prefer to see it go to the west coast to a museum there so that Shuttle hardware is located across the geography of the country.
From my research, it's not even the Mona Lisa that is the important painting in that hall. Rather it is the painting on the opposite wall that holds a clue to finding the Sangreal.
I agree that New York is a piss-poor choice: as I've posted elsewhere, the Intrepid is a lousy place to preserve historically-significant machinery. Outdoors in the salt air? No.
No argument about the Smithsonian either: it's *the* federal museum.
But I'm not sure about KSC and Space Center Houston. They've got a lot of great stuff, but I consider their mission to be primarily the business of spaceflight, with tourism and museum projects second. Also, I'd like to see key space artifacts spread around the country, both so they can inspire a wider range of people, and so that a really nasty hurricane can't wipe out *all* of our space artifacts in one go.
Me, I'm voting for the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, which does a great job of preserving and displaying really big machinery, gets a *ton* of visitors, and could use a centerpiece like this.
Also, the naked dead guy.
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Yeah really, considering how long Canaveral had their Saturn V outside exposed to UV and Florida thunderstorms that's a bit presumptuous, the Saturn V was a MUCH more import vehicle and yet for ~40 years NASA themselves couldn't/wouldn't spend the money to preserve it to last even 100 years.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
That is just a knee-jerk reaction to what happened to the Russian space shuttle. After retirement (after one flight) it was stored in less-than-stable circumstances in Kazakhstan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)#Destruction
http://www.buran.ru/images/jpg/bbur89.jpg
BTW, the Russian shuttle was largely a copy of the US shuttle, except they added some safety features. When the Russians start making safety improvements to your design, you know you have a problem.
There is quite strong consensus that it wasn't a copy, but independetly developed counterpart - and given the requirements for comparable missions and technology available at the time, the shape of Shuttle & Buran was pretty much the only sensible one...
Look at typical Airbus & Boeing aircraft. Or some biological examples
One that hath name thou can not otter
even if NYC were nuked, after they perfect the radiation eating nanobots in 2398, it will still be a nice place for a city, since most other coastal cities are built at river mouths on silt, and will mostly likely be sunk under water, or, if on the west coast, taking a ride to alaska on the san andreas fault express
nyc is actually one of the best natural places to have a city in terms of seismic stability, metereological stability, geological strength, stable high quality aquifer, geographic strategical location (the hudson river->erie canal->great lakes), political stability, etc
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yes, but the Apollo/Saturn V center building was only completed in 1996. Prior to then, the rocket sat outside (near the VAB), and suffered severe damage from the salt air and weather exposure. The rocket was cosmetically restored prior to the opening of the new building.
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Wait, what did the US have to do with the decommissioning of Mir? You realize Mir was a Russian station, right?
Unless they are going to put the Shuttle Indoors, this is a horrible decision. If you're ever in NY go check out Cleopatra's Needle, which has been in Central park since 1881, but were built in ancient Egypt in around 1450 BC out of solid granite.
According to the USGS:
The surface of the stone is heavily weathered, nearly masking the rows of hieroglyphs engraved on all sides. Photographs taken near the time the obelisk was erected in the park show that the inscriptions were still quite legible. The stone had lain in the Egyptian desert for nearly 3000 years but undergone little weathering. In a little more than a century in the climate of New York City, pollution and acid rain have heavily pitted its surfaces.
Good luck keeping the shuttle safe on an aircraft carrier, on the ocean from crumbling in a few years.
in terms of taste, quality, quantity, and stability
and here's some breaking news for you on the subject:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/science/earth/24drill.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it