How Museums Fought for the Retired Space Shuttles

On July 8, 2011, the last space shuttle rose from Earth. With four astronauts aboard, Atlantis —billed as a space truck during its development because of its capacity to carry large payloads to space—delivered a massive pressurized storage container filled with equipment and supplies to the International Space Station . After circling the globe for more than a week docked to the space station, the Atlantis crew woke up on the mission’s final morning to Kate Smith’s rendition of God Bless America , which had been iconic in the 1970s when the shuttle was in development. Then, Atlantis returned to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on July 21. Three decades after it began, America’s Space Shuttle program was now grounded, and for good.

Several months before that last mission, on April 12, 2011, NASA had marked the 50th anniversary of the first human in space, and the 30th anniversary of the first shuttle launch. Between 1981 and 2011, the five functional shuttles of the Space Transportation System , or STS, flew 135 missions to space. Two of these five space-faring orbiters were lost to accidents; Challenger had broken apart shortly after launch in 1986, and Columbia , the oldest in the fleet, had disintegrated shortly before landing in 2003. The three remaining orbiters became highly sought artifacts as STS drew toward its end. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former shuttle astronaut himself, decided to use the April 12 double anniversary that day to announce the permanent homes of Atlantis , Discovery , and Endeavour .

There are more than 200 aviation museums in the United States, so competition for the prized artifacts was fierce. In 2008 and 2010, NASA put out a call to determine their interest in housing the shuttles, and 29 replied with an enthusiastic ‘yes!’ The organizations NASA selected would be charged with telling the story of America’s extended forays in low-Earth orbit. The shuttle is most fondly remembered for its role in the deployment and repair of the Hubble Space Telescope and for building and supplying the International Space Station.

Of the organizations in contention, many insiders and space fans figured that the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum , in Washington, D.C., would get Discovery , the workhorse of the fleet, so that the artifact would remain the shuttle of record for serious study in the future. But Valerie Neal, the museum’s curator of Space History, wasn’t as sure. When the announcement came, Neal says, she felt “jubilation, because we had been hoping to be assigned an orbiter,” and also “relief, because NASA played it very close.” In that moment, she and her colleagues “let out a cheer and bounced around.” Bringing a flown-in-space shuttle to the most visited museum complex in the world was the culmination of her career of more than two decades.

Preparations for the shuttle’s arrival at the Smithsonian took nearly a year. On April 20, 2012, Discovery arrived at the Udvar-Hazy Center , an annex to the National Air and Space Museum near D.C.’s Dulles Airport. Eileen Collins, who, aboard Discovery , had become the first female shuttle pilot, was there. So was former Senator John Glenn, who had been the first American to orbit Earth, in 1962, and who flew aboard Discovery in 1998. Along with other dignitaries, astronauts, shuttle workers, and reporters, they watched the orbiter towed into the hangar. By the late afternoon, the space-nerds, parents, and eager children who had waited in the hot sun swarmed into the new exhibit that Neal describes as “the signature spacecraft” in the Udvar-Hazy collection. Over the first year Discovery was on display, attendance at that facility went up 20 percent from the previous year.

The National Air and Space Museum already had the test shuttle Enterprise , which was designed and used to see how an orbiter performed in the air and was never refitted to fly to space, on display at Udvar-Hazy. In the proposal to acquire a flown-in-space orbiter, the museum agreed to relinquish that test shuttle back to NASA. When Enterprise and Discovery were nose-to-nose at Udvar-Hazy in April 2012, anyone present could see that Enterprise looked clean and pristine, whereas Discovery was scuffed from its years of work on orbit. Enterprise , which had been renamed before its unveiling because thousands of Star Trek fans wrote to President Gerald Ford, moved from the Udvar-Hazy Facility to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum . By July 19, 2012, it was in its new Big Apple home on the Hudson River and open to the public.