On October 11, 2012, NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery embarked on its arduous, 12-mile journey from an airplane hangar to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The iconic spacecraft had just survived its final “flight” while strapped to the roof of a Boeing 747.
Officials went to extreme efforts to prevent the Shuttle from being dismantled during transport. The streets of LA were too narrow, for instance, forcing officials to temporarily remove traffic lights. Around 400 trees lining the city’s streets even had to be cut down to make way. (Around 1,000 trees were eventually replanted along the route to replace them.)
Now NASA is preparing to move Discovery, which flew 39 flights between 1984 and 2011, from the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia to the Space Center Museum in Houston, Texas — and this time, chopping it into pieces for the trip is entirely on the table.
Baked into president Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which was signed into law this summer, was a provision by Texas senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz to spend $85 million for the relocation.
As NASA Watch reports, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget is investigating whether to tear the Discovery into pieces to move it to Texas, raising alarm bells among those looking to preserve an important and symbolic relic of the United States’ space program.
“This development is unprecedented and alarming,” wrote NASA Watch, a blog by former NASA scientist Keith Cowing. “NASA did not design the shuttle orbiters to be disassembled, and complicating factors include the shuttle’s aluminum frame, [roughly] 24,000 delicate ceramic tiles that coat the shuttle’s underside (the black part), and [around] 2,000 thermal insulation fabric blankets that coat the rest of the shuttle (the white part).”
“Disassembling Discovery would cause significant and irreparable damage to these and other portions of the shuttle,” the blog concluded.
The Smithsonian reached out to the Congressional Authorizing & Appropriating Committees, concluding that the “Discovery will have to undergo significant disassembly to be moved,” according to a letter obtained by NASA Watch.
“Discovery is the most intact shuttle orbiter of the NASA program, and we remain concerned that disassembling the vehicle will destroy its historical value,” the letter reads.
The space agency also found that moving it could be far more costly than anticipated, estimating a range of $120 million to $150 million, significantly more than the $85 million provisioned by Cornyn and Cruz.
“It’s a goofy idea,” NASA Watch’s Keith Cowing told Washington, DC-based news station WUSA9. “It’s like taking the Washington Monument, sawing it into pieces, and moving it somewhere.”
Officials agree that it makes little sense to move the delicate spacecraft.
“Viewing and preserving this artifact at the Smithsonian allows scholars and the public to appreciate the story of how Americans were the first to develop a reusable system to transport humans to space, laying the groundwork to move humans back to the Moon and on to Mars,” the Smithsonian wrote in its letter.
But Republican lawmakers aren’t looking to back down.
Cornyn accused the Smithsonian of “clearly grasping at straws and denying precedent” in a statement to WUSA9. “Discovery belongs in Houston, and will make the journey there safely, securely, and efficiently in accordance with the law, whether the woke Smithsonian and its cronies in Congress like it or not.”
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