Specious Shuttle
It's Day 11 of our 12-day trip -- the trip's very last day!* -- and we started it in Huntsville, Alabama, where they park space shuttles by the freeway.
* -- You might take this sentence as an example of me failing to understand how numbers work, but I'll explain that in Wednesday's posts, I think.
That isn't a real space shuttle, of course. All the real space shuttles are someplace else. This is a full-scale mock-up called Pathfinder, which NASA keeps outside the US Space & Rocket Center, where they host their famous Space Camp for kids. NASA built this mock-up in a more bare-bones version in 1977 to use as a dummy shuttle they could haul around Cape Canaveral to make sure the real thing would fit every place they wanted it to go. It was generally the same size, weight, and shape as a real space shuttle, but mostly made of wood on steel supports. In 1983, a Japanese company bought it, refurbished it up to look more like an actual shuttle, attached the Pathfinder name to it, and displayed it for a couple of years at Tokyo's Great Shuttle Exposition. NASA bought it back and put it here in Huntsville in 1988. Huntsville's been happy with it, figuring a fake space shuttle is better than no space shuttle at all.
This gives me an unexpected opportunity to go into another example of how the current leadership of this country is really dumb, though, as not everybody associated with the space program is as easily satisfied as Huntsville.
The space shuttle program was hard on space ships, but three actual space shuttles (Discovery, Atlantis, and Endevour) and one sort-of shuttle (Enterprise) survived long enough to be retired. Once the program shut down, there was a rush among museums and government institutions to display the surviving ships. Enterprise -- the prototype that never went to space and was built solely for atmospheric testing -- wound up parked on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Hudson River. NASA kept the Atlantis for their museum at Cape Canaveral. Endevour went to the California Science Center in Los Angeles, which is where I saw it in 2013. NASA gave Discovery to the Smithsonian Institute, and the Smithsonian has had it on display at an annex out at Dulles Airport since 2012.
I didn't pay attention to the political reasoning at the time so I don't know the negotiations that went into these allotments. I do know that the guys down at the Johnson Space Center in Houston weren't happy about it, though, and they've been grumbling about it ever since. Houston's where NASA kept Mission Control, after all, with its control room full of big screens. Surely, they deserved a shuttle more than anybody else. But nope. NASA gave a shuttle to California, but Texas got squat.
But now it's 13 years later, and Trump's just getting started on his second chance to wreck the Presidency and destroy the economy while Republicans run Congress into ground by somehow simultaneously defunding everything useful and running up the deficit to all-time highs. They came up with this massive tax-cut-and-spend bill with a stupid name from a Trump fever dream that's full of the dumbest crap they could imagine, and one of the dumbest pieces of crap was a rider inserted by the two US senators from Texas requiring NASA to yank Discovery from its parking place outside Washington and haul it down to Houston to be displayed at the Johnson Space Center. The deficit hawks allocated $85 million to do this very stupid thing.
Now, the problem isn't so much that they mean to take a space shuttle from the Smithsonian Institute and send it to Texas. I mean, that's a dumb and pointless way to spend $85 million, but that's not what makes the scheme insane. What makes it insane is that there's no actual way to do it. I mean, at this moment, it's physically impossible, and any attempt to pull this off is far more likely to destroy Discovery and send it to a scrap yard than actually get it to Texas.
As you might imagine, a space shuttle is a large, heavy object, and moving it even when the shuttle program was going strong was an enormous and expensive task. A shuttle can't just fly from place to place on its own. It's engines were solely for orbital maneuvers. It was a glider inside the atmosphere, and it dropped like a brick. If you wanted to move a shuttle from, say, Edwards Air Force Base in California to Cape Canaveral in Florida, you had to get a bunch of cranes to lift it on top of one of two modified Boeing 747 airliners built specifically to haul a space shuttle around. When the space shuttle program ended, both 747s were retired and dismantled for parts, and now they only exist as shells displayed in museums in California and Texas. They can't be rebuilt to haul Discovery.
But there aren't any other practical ways to move Discovery, either. It's too big and heavy to move by truck or train. You could load it on a barge and haul it to Houston by sea -- that's how they got Enterprise to its aircraft carrier -- but you'd have to get it from Dulles to the sea. The only way to move it is to build an all-new plane for it, and that alone will probably cost the entire $85 million allocated to the project. And then you've got to get Discovery back into flight condition and move it onto the plane and get the plane to Houston and ... and ... and ...
There's a lot of back-and-forth on the internet about what it cost in 2012 to move the Endevour to Los Angeles, though various sources say just getting it the 12 miles from LAX to the California Science Center cost between 10 and 20 million dollars. Wikipedia hints (with a source behind a pay wall) that the entire project had a budget of $200 million, and that was the cost using existing equipment. NASA suggests moving Discovery now will cost something over $300 million, but while NASA has famously never had cost overruns (/sarcasm), I think that's wildly optimistic.
So, you want my tl;dr take on this? I don't care what John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are smoking and don't know where that $85 million is going to go, they're not going to move the space shuttle Discovery. Houston will just have to go without.
Specious Shuttle
It's Day 11 of our 12-day trip -- the trip's very last day!* -- and we started it in Huntsville, Alabama, where they park space shuttles by the freeway.
* -- You might take this sentence as an example of me failing to understand how numbers work, but I'll explain that in Wednesday's posts, I think.
That isn't a real space shuttle, of course. All the real space shuttles are someplace else. This is a full-scale mock-up called Pathfinder, which NASA keeps outside the US Space & Rocket Center, where they host their famous Space Camp for kids. NASA built this mock-up in a more bare-bones version in 1977 to use as a dummy shuttle they could haul around Cape Canaveral to make sure the real thing would fit every place they wanted it to go. It was generally the same size, weight, and shape as a real space shuttle, but mostly made of wood on steel supports. In 1983, a Japanese company bought it, refurbished it up to look more like an actual shuttle, attached the Pathfinder name to it, and displayed it for a couple of years at Tokyo's Great Shuttle Exposition. NASA bought it back and put it here in Huntsville in 1988. Huntsville's been happy with it, figuring a fake space shuttle is better than no space shuttle at all.
This gives me an unexpected opportunity to go into another example of how the current leadership of this country is really dumb, though, as not everybody associated with the space program is as easily satisfied as Huntsville.
The space shuttle program was hard on space ships, but three actual space shuttles (Discovery, Atlantis, and Endevour) and one sort-of shuttle (Enterprise) survived long enough to be retired. Once the program shut down, there was a rush among museums and government institutions to display the surviving ships. Enterprise -- the prototype that never went to space and was built solely for atmospheric testing -- wound up parked on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Hudson River. NASA kept the Atlantis for their museum at Cape Canaveral. Endevour went to the California Science Center in Los Angeles, which is where I saw it in 2013. NASA gave Discovery to the Smithsonian Institute, and the Smithsonian has had it on display at an annex out at Dulles Airport since 2012.
I didn't pay attention to the political reasoning at the time so I don't know the negotiations that went into these allotments. I do know that the guys down at the Johnson Space Center in Houston weren't happy about it, though, and they've been grumbling about it ever since. Houston's where NASA kept Mission Control, after all, with its control room full of big screens. Surely, they deserved a shuttle more than anybody else. But nope. NASA gave a shuttle to California, but Texas got squat.
But now it's 13 years later, and Trump's just getting started on his second chance to wreck the Presidency and destroy the economy while Republicans run Congress into ground by somehow simultaneously defunding everything useful and running up the deficit to all-time highs. They came up with this massive tax-cut-and-spend bill with a stupid name from a Trump fever dream that's full of the dumbest crap they could imagine, and one of the dumbest pieces of crap was a rider inserted by the two US senators from Texas requiring NASA to yank Discovery from its parking place outside Washington and haul it down to Houston to be displayed at the Johnson Space Center. The deficit hawks allocated $85 million to do this very stupid thing.
Now, the problem isn't so much that they mean to take a space shuttle from the Smithsonian Institute and send it to Texas. I mean, that's a dumb and pointless way to spend $85 million, but that's not what makes the scheme insane. What makes it insane is that there's no actual way to do it. I mean, at this moment, it's physically impossible, and any attempt to pull this off is far more likely to destroy Discovery and send it to a scrap yard than actually get it to Texas.
As you might imagine, a space shuttle is a large, heavy object, and moving it even when the shuttle program was going strong was an enormous and expensive task. A shuttle can't just fly from place to place on its own. It's engines were solely for orbital maneuvers. It was a glider inside the atmosphere, and it dropped like a brick. If you wanted to move a shuttle from, say, Edwards Air Force Base in California to Cape Canaveral in Florida, you had to get a bunch of cranes to lift it on top of one of two modified Boeing 747 airliners built specifically to haul a space shuttle around. When the space shuttle program ended, both 747s were retired and dismantled for parts, and now they only exist as shells displayed in museums in California and Texas. They can't be rebuilt to haul Discovery.
But there aren't any other practical ways to move Discovery, either. It's too big and heavy to move by truck or train. You could load it on a barge and haul it to Houston by sea -- that's how they got Enterprise to its aircraft carrier -- but you'd have to get it from Dulles to the sea. The only way to move it is to build an all-new plane for it, and that alone will probably cost the entire $85 million allocated to the project. And then you've got to get Discovery back into flight condition and move it onto the plane and get the plane to Houston and ... and ... and ...
There's a lot of back-and-forth on the internet about what it cost in 2012 to move the Endevour to Los Angeles, though various sources say just getting it the 12 miles from LAX to the California Science Center cost between 10 and 20 million dollars. Wikipedia hints (with a source behind a pay wall) that the entire project had a budget of $200 million, and that was the cost using existing equipment. NASA suggests moving Discovery now will cost something over $300 million, but while NASA has famously never had cost overruns (/sarcasm), I think that's wildly optimistic.
So, you want my tl;dr take on this? I don't care what John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are smoking and don't know where that $85 million is going to go, they're not going to move the space shuttle Discovery. Houston will just have to go without.