Leave it where it is.
— Clean Observer (@hammbear2024.bsky.social) July 14, 2025 at 1:12 PM
The “Big Beautiful Bill” Is Trying To Steal A Space Shuttle [gift link]
The Space Shuttle drips romance. Representing nearly a half-century of human spaceflight—from its conception in 1968, even before the Moon landing, until its retirement in 2011—its design and even its name capture a hope that space travel would one day be commonplace. That before long, the first step to heading to the Moon or Mars would be as workaday as boarding a shuttle for a quick jaunt to low Earth orbit. It proved a beautiful, flawed achievement: Two traumatic catastrophes showed early safety analyses were overgenerous, but the Shuttle did provide the freight and manpower for the first tentative steps toward a permanent spacefaring presence, and all the science that came with it. The craft themselves are retrofuturist works of art: gleaming white above, reverse countershaded beneath, all swooping curves and aerodynamic lines. A stately relic of space-age optimism.
It’s no wonder, upon the program’s retirement, that everyone wanted a Shuttle. Twenty-one museums and institutions vied for the right to house one of the four surviving craft. NASA made its selections based on applicants’ historical significance and plans to preserve and display the Shuttles, and in 2011 the winners were announced. The Intrepid Museum in New York received Enterprise; Kennedy Space Center in Florida got Atlantis; the California Science Center obtained Endeavour; and the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, an annex of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Fairfax County, Va., received Discovery.
Many of the cities not selected cried foul, none louder than Houston, home of the Johnson Space Center, which has been “Mission Control” for every single NASA human spaceflight since the Gemini Program. They surely had a beef—I remember being shocked and feeling like New York had somehow gotten away with something when it was picked over Houston—but their efforts to be selected were reportedly kind of half-assed. Still, Texas has never forgotten the snub, and bided its time until the political power to redress it landed in the hands of someone venal and petty enough to exercise it.
Someone like Donald Trump. The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law on July 4, addresses the old grudge deep, deep within its 900-odd pages. The bill authorizes $85 million to be spent on moving Discovery from Virginia to Texas. It is pork barrel legislation adopted directly from and functionally enacting the “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act” introduced earlier this year by Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.
Rather than settling the vehicle’s fate, however, this is just kicking off a nasty battle between the states, and between the Smithsonian and the federal government. The relocation is far from assured, for a number of reasons…
Space Tech Open Thread: No Theft Too Large or SmallPost + Comments (69)
