Shuttles for sale-Previously owned-Not cheap
That’s the headline for this article by Guy Gugliotta in the current issue of Air&Space Smithsonian magazine.
After 29 years and hundreds of flights (129 at last count) NASA is getting ready to pull the plug on the Space Transportation System, which is the official name for the space shuttle program.
“Sometime this year – right now it looks like September 30 – NASA plans to shut down the program,” Gugliotta writes. When that happens, the last three space surviving shuttles (Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour) will be donated by NASA “to whoever it feels can provide the best homes.”
For personal reasons, I wouldn’t mind getting hold of one of these babies. Unfortunately while the “donate” part is correct, it seems you have to come up with $42 million for shipping and handling ($6 million pays for the Boeing 747 that will piggyback the orbiter to an airport of choice). And, oh yeah, you have to provide a building to display your shuttle indoors and, oh yeah, only U.S. museums and educational institutions are eligible.
Well, darn. Probably just as well. Being 122 feet long, weighing 151,000 pounds and having 78-foot wingspans, one of those guys wouldn’t fit in my apartment anyway.
The personal part comes from watching the shuttle Columbia when it landed at Northrop Strip at White Sands Missile Range on March 30, 1982. It was the third space shuttle mission and the only one that ever landed at White Sands, which had been designated as a backup strip in case Edwards Air Force Base was unavailable.
That happened in 1982 after heavy rains flooded the primary strip at Edwards. When it was announced White Sands would be the landing strip, journalists and television crews from around the world converged on Las Cruces. I lucked into the assignment for my newspaper, the Farmington (N.M.) Daily Times because I was the only person on the news staff who was a reporter, a photographer and could also operate single incredibly clunky portable word processor/modem the newspaper owned at that time.
So off I went, zooming down almost the entire length of the Land of Enchantment to Las Cruces, checking into a hotel which didn’t have hot water (the proprietors couldn’t figure out how to keep the pilot light lit). Other adventures included being sandblasted by a dust storm the shuttle was supposed to land (but didn’t) and busting out the wing window of my Ford Fiesta after locking myself out of the car that same morning.
But, busted wing window and all, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
The morning of the landing was incredibly clear and I still have vivid memories of listening to the shuttle crew start their descent, then way sooner than you would think possible spotting the little, dark speck in the sky and watching it rapidly grow into a recognizable shape. Then came the twin sonic booms (one caused by the shock wave off the nose and the other from one off the tail) and finally the landing, a hold-your-breath moment because they didn’t drop the nose gear until the last second.
I remember being damn proud of being an American right then and watching the future land in the New Mexico desert. Those are the memories I like to keep of Columbia and the space program, not the ones from later years of the Challenger disaster and then, on a dark morning in February 2003, hearing the Columbia had also suffered a grim fate, breaking up in the sky over Texas 16 minutes from landing.
Well, time moves on. The space shuttles will be replaced, but it’s not clear exactly by what or when. But I’ve still got a few mementos from the White Sands gig, and here’s one:
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
