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NASA Announces Final Homes of Shuttle Fleet
PyroMosh writes "NASA administrator Charles Bolden just announced the final homes for the four remaining Space Shuttle Orbiters in a ceremony at Kennedy Space Center today commemorating the 30th anniversary of the first Shuttle launch.
The Shuttle Atlantis will remain at NASA's home of Shuttle Launch operations — Kennedy Space Center.
Endeavour will be displayed at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, just miles from where she was assembled.
Discovery will be moved to the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum in Virginia outside of Washington DC — the very hangar that Enterprise now occupies.
Finally, the Shuttle airframe prototype Enterprise will be moved from her current home to the U.S.S. Intrepid Sea Air & Space Museum in New York City."
The Enterprise should go to San Fransisco. Future Starfleet Academy Cadets could use it for training & simulations.
The formula since the mid-'70s in almost every Western country has been as follows:
Make service bureaucratic and inefficient -> observe cost increase -> reduce service levels rather than bureaucracy -> observe service level reduction -> announce that partnership with private sector will improve service provision -> observe cost increase -> reduce service levels rather than profits -> observe service level reduction -> announce that government is a failure -> sell off everything -> announce record deficit reduction -> declare that your country is free from the tyranny of government -> end up with no service at all.
Enjoy your corporations.
For the Museum of Flight's new space wing, which is pretty much finished, with an available space for a Shuttle. But instead the museum will be getting a full fuselage Shuttle trainer. In a way this is actually better. The Shuttle can't be touched. However visitors will be able to go inside the trainer. Just as every astronaut who has ever flown the Shuttle has done.