![]() "It's going to be a lot easier to move because it's larger in volume, but it doesn't have wings so it's nowhere near as wide as Endeavour was," Rudolph said. Many Southern California residents will recall the shuttle’s own carefully orchestrated final journey, with splashy flyovers of key landmarks, a final trek over city streets, and the removal of dozens of trees and traffic signals to make way for its cumbersome, five-story frame.ĮT-94 is a much bigger beast than the shuttle, but it is not expected to have quite the same impact on the local infrastructure. The city plans to work with the Science Center to make this a great welcome and celebration as it did with Endeavour two and a half years ago," Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a written statement. "We are thrilled that NASA has gifted the California Science Center and the city of Los Angeles with the last surviving flight-qualified space shuttle external tank (ET) in the world. These have to be restored before it goes on display. Columbia accident investigators spent a lot of time examining ET-94 and, in doing so, cut away some pieces of the foam, Rudolph said. NASA's external tanks were not designed for reuse, so this one has never been used, and the museum said ET-94 is the only "flight-qualified" tank in existence.ĮT-94 is the sister tank to ET-93 which was involved in the space shuttle Columbia accident. sometime at the end of 2015 or in early 2016, depending on weather conditions and the progress of its own restoration, according to the museum. The tank, dubbed ET-94, is currently housed at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans and is expected to begin its journey to L.A. "They knew that we'd been planning from the beginning to display Endeavour in launch position." "I think NASA really shared our belief that the vision of building a full stack and having it in one place, the whole space shuttle system, was really valuable," President and CEO of the California Science Center Jeff Rudolph told KPCC. The plan is to present the shuttle in its launch position. The donation from NASA will bring the museum one step closer to its mission of creating a “full stack” for Endeavour’s final display at the future Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center. The science center has acquired one of the giant orange external fuel tanks the shuttles once rode piggy-back into space. Three years after Space Shuttle Endeavour threaded its way across the streets of Los Angeles to its final home at the California Science Center, another gargantuan vessel could be making the same epic journey, the museum said Thursday. ![]()
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