Fire Sale on Shuttles

NASA is seeking out museums and other parties that are willing to display the retired shuttles.  The only hitch is that you need to pay about $29 million just to get the shuttle to your location since it will be delivered via a special Boeing 747.  The Wall Street Journal had a good article on NASA's search, titled Shuttle Diplomacy: Museums Launch Bids for Retiring Space Planes.  One of the new locations has already been decided - Washington DC's National Air and Space Museum. The museum will be getting the shuttle Discovery.  And while the museum already has the shuttle Enterprise (which never left the ground), it is willing to put the Enterprise back into play so it is now one of the three shuttles to be relocated (the other two being Atlantis and Endeavour, since the Challenger and Columbia are no longer with us).

NASA requires that the other locations be in the United States and near a large airport that can handle the 747.  Another condition is that you need to get the shuttle from the airport to the proposed location intact, which is no easy feat for many locations.  Some potential future hosts of shuttles include New York City's Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, Dayton's National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Seattle's Museum of Flight, Houston's Johnson Space Center, and the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.  Competition will be fierce, and congressional leaders are expected to muddy the waters with their own pleas. 

I am a bit concerned that we are fighting over these museum relics while our space program currently has nothing on the drawing board to replace the shuttle.  Remember the Soviet Union's Buran?  This Soviet shuttle was a complete rip-off of our space shuttle, which is itself a sad story given the Soviets great strides in space travel.  But the really sad story is the final end to the Buran.  It was retired in 1993 and destroyed when a hangar collapsed in 2002.  Nothing similar was ever tried again.

However, the Russians still have the last laugh since they currently have the only spacecraft that can get American astronauts up to the International Space Station.  Even more interesting, there were rumors of the Russian's trying to revive the Buran shuttle program to take advantage of the demise of the U.S. Space Shuttle program.  I have not read anything new about this, but it would certainly be an interesting turn of events.