Houston loses bid to acquire retired shuttle

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER — Diane Brenner couldn’t hold back tears as NASA’s administrator announced the museums that would receive a retired space shuttle.

Brenner, a native of Dayton, Ohio, said she was devastated NASA will not be sending one of the beloved orbiters to Houston.

Discovery will go to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum near Washington, D.C. Endeavour will head to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., will receive Atlantis.

Enterprise, a prototype shuttle that performed test flights, will head to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden made the announcement from the Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, which marked the 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle flight and the 50th anniversary of man’s first voyage to space, made by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

Brenner said her father in the mid-1960s was a U.S. Air Force civilian program analyst on the Dyna-Soar project, a series of studies on space transportation systems that laid the foundation for the shuttles’ semi-reusable design.

The Air Force’s fiscal year 2012 budget requested $14 million to prepare and display an orbiter at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton.

“That neither Houston or Dayton got a shuttle to me is blowing off the fact that the space shuttle program was born in both places,” Brenner said.

“New York and LA just don’t deserve it. They have nothing to do with the space shuttle program.”

Space Center Houston proposed a 53,000-square-foot addition to house a shuttle and exhibit that would focus on the human side of shuttle operations, including astronaut activities and what was accomplished on the orbiter.

Richard Allen, president and CEO of Space Center Houston, said he was disheartened that a shuttle would not come to Houston, home of the Astronaut Corps and mission control for the shuttle program.

The center, which is next to the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, was among 21 institutions that campaigned for a retired orbiter.

“Certainly, we had planned to have one of the orbiters here,” Allen said. “It wasn’t to be.”

Institutions that did not receive an orbiter will receive significant shuttle hardware artifacts, Bolden said.

Johnson Space Center will receive flight deck, commander and pilots seats.

Bob Mitchell, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, said he would ask members of the Texas congressional delegation to launch a congressional investigation of Bolden’s decision.

Mitchell and other supporters of the “Bring the Shuttle Home” campaign said Bolden’s decision to snub Texas was influenced by the White House.

“Politics should never play a part in a decision about a piece of American history,” Mitchell said. “Today, I’m afraid politics trumped common sense.”

The shuttle program is winding down with only two more flights left. Endeavour is scheduled to launch April 29, and Atlantis will close the program with the final mission June 28.

Natalie Walker, an educational instructor at Space Center Houston, said a shuttle would have been an amazing education tool at the center.

“At the space center, we teach a lot about rocketry, and if we had an actual orbiter, that would have been a great tool for kids to see,” Walker said. “Most kids have not been to Kennedy Space Center. They’ve only seen on TV what a space shuttle looks like.”