Adler Planetarium finds out today whether it will be the retirement home of one of NASA’s four space shuttles.
Competition has been hot among 21 institutions vying for the shuttles – Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour and Enterprise, a prototype model that was never flown in space – despite a price tag on obtaining and displaying the spacecraft that could run to $100 million.
One shoo-in appears to be the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., which earlier was promised a shuttle by NASA.
Endeavour is scheduled to take off on its final flight April 29, and Atlantis’ last flight is scheduled to launch June 28. Then NASA will shutter the fleet and the program.
At a 90-minute televised ceremony Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center celebrating the 50th anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first manned spaceflight and the 30th anniversary of the first shuttle spaceflight, NASA chief Charles Bolden will announce the institutions that will be getting the retired shuttles.
Adler will carry the broadcast live for its visitors, beginning at noon in its Universe Theater.
“We are cautiously optimistic about getting one of the shuttle vehicles,” said Adler President Paul Knappenberger, who said he met with NASA officials a couple of weeks ago for a final review of the planetarium’s bid.
The favorites
Besides the Smithsonian, many think the space museum at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida has a strong chance because of its history with the shuttle program. After that, the field seems wide-open.
“The Adler raised its profile a great deal” in the bidding when it recently published an artist’s conception of a dramatic glass pavilion overlooking the city’s skyline to house the shuttle, said Robert Pearlman, founder and editor of collectspace.com, a space history website, who has tracked the shuttle bids closely.
The Adler plan
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The shuttles will be delivered atop a Boeing 747 transporter. If the delivery were made to O’Hare International Airport, the problem would be how to get the shuttle to Adler’s lakefront campus. So Adler has identified three other airports near Lake Michigan that have runways long enough for the plane to land, and from which the shuttle could be delivered to Adler aboard a barge, Knappenberger said.
NASA wants to deliver all four shuttles no later than September 2012, Knappenberger said. Adler would either store the shuttle in an airport hangar or build a temporary hangar at the old Meigs Field until completion of its permanent home, which would be built atop a parking lot next to the museum.
Why Adler?
“We are in a metropolitan area with 9.5 million residents, and the city has 45 million visitors every year,” Knappenberger said. “We would give access for more people to see a shuttle than most of the other candidates. None of the others is in such a spectacular setting as ours would be. Most of the others are airplane and flight museums, but the Adler is a science museum.
“The story we would tell would be much broader than the others, showing how the shuttles were enablers for all sorts of work in space, from launching satellites to building the space station to servicing the Hubble (Space Telescope).”