![]() “It’s considered in transition to retirement.”ĭiscovery should be ready for transport to the Smithsonian by January or February, Beutel said. “Discovery, as of early May, officially is considered no longer a flight-status shuttle,” Beutel said. 2, where it is being readied for display at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Northern Virginia. Discovery sits right next-door to Endeavour, in Orbital Processing Facility No. The agency has begun the transition work on the shuttle Discovery, which wrapped up its final mission, STS-133, in March. ![]() The decommissioning work, while not old hat for NASA, is not unprecedented, either. NASA will keep the original ones, which could be useful references in the design or testing of new equipment, officials have said. The parts will then be reattached to Endeavour at Kennedy, though the main engines will be replicas. Twenty years from now, we don’t want some sort of piping to degrade and suddenly drip hydrazine on people.” “They’re completely flushing out the system. “This is for ‘museum-clean,’” said Allard Beutel, NASA spokesman at Kennedy Space Center. These parts will be shipped to a NASA facility in White Sands, N.M., for thorough decontamination. They will remove the thruster system inside the shuttle’s nose, for example, as well as the big engines on either side of its tail. When that is done, workers will begin the decommissioning process in earnest, taking some of Endeavour apart. These activities should take several weeks, NASA officials said. 1 at Kennedy Space Center for technicians to begin removing supplies and cargo, as they would following any shuttle mission. Shortly after landing, Endeavour was rolled into Orbiter Processing Facility No. And it will begin almost immediately, NASA officials said. Transforming Endeavour from a flight-ready shuttle into a museum specimen is an involved process that will take months. NASA is retiring its space shuttle fleet after 30 years of spaceflight to make way for new deep space missions aimed at visiting an asteroid by 2025 and Mars by the mid-2030s. “I think we all look forward to visiting it in the science museum there. ![]() “I imagine millions of people, hopefully millions of people a year, will get to enjoy getting up close to the space shuttle,” STS-134 commander Mark Kelly told reporters from orbit May 31. Only one mission now remains for NASA’s fleet of space shuttles: the STS-135 flight of Atlantis, scheduled to launch July 8.Īfter a lengthy decommissioning process, Endeavour, the youngest orbiter in the fleet, should be ready to be shipped out west for display at the California Science Center in Los Angeles by next spring. SEATTLE - With its final space mission in the history books, the Space Shuttle Endeavour begins preparations for a life of leisure as a museum showpiece.Įndeavour touched down at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida before sunrise June 1, bringing an end to its 16-day STS-134 spaceflight.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |