At last, the final voyage of the last space shuttle ever built, Endeavor, and its giant orange external tank is expected to begin this month: the cornerstone of a historic journey toward an ambitious museum display in Los Angeles.
It will be a momentous occasion for the California Science Center, the state museum just south of downtown Los Angeles, which is building the 20-story Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center to house Endeavor. Anticipation for the museum’s new wing has been building for more than a decade, following NASA’s 2011 decision to send Endeavor to Los Angeles and the orbiter’s trip across the country in 2012, flying over the Hollywood Sign before to embark on a three-day trip through the streets of the city. to your new home.
Unlike any other exhibit featuring a retired space shuttle, Endeavor in Los Angeles will be set up in a full array, pointing toward the stars, as if ready for launch.
Barring weather delays, starting next week, the giant 65,000-pound, 154-foot-long orange external tank is expected to be moved and then elevated from its current horizontal position to a vertical orientation, where it will be attached to the propellers of solid rockets that have already been installed.
Then, no sooner than the end of the month, space shuttle Endeavor itself will be lifted from its horizontal position to its vertical position and attached to the external tank. It will be the first time a shuttle designed for space is assembled vertically outside of a NASA or Air Force facility.
Jeffrey Rudolph, president of the California Science Center, at the opening of the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center in 2022.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
The operation will be a sight to see, and key moments of lifting the external tank and Endeavor will be broadcast online by the California Science Center. The cranes that will lift the spaceship are quite tall, the tallest of which will be about the height of City Hall.
“Show time!” said Jeffrey Rudolph, president of the California Science Center.
The prelude to the big lift of the external tank is scheduled for Jan. 10, when it will be moved by self-propelled modular transporters, similar to those used to move the Endeavor through city streets in 2012, down State Drive to the museum’s new wing . construction site. The trip will take approximately two hours, passing through the science center and the rose garden of the exhibition park.
Then, on the afternoon of January 11 and into the next morning, the external tank will be lifted, starting sometime after 10 pm. Because the move will be outdoors, any significant wind could cause delays in the big move, and the museum doesn’t want something very large swinging from a crane in high winds.
“The trend, at least in December, was for the winds to die down around 10 pm and pick up around 4 am. Assuming that holds until early January, we will try to take advantage of that six-hour window to lift the tank and put it in the well,” said Dennis Jenkins, project manager at the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center.
The orange external tank will join twin solid rocket boosters already installed at the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center construction site at the California Science Center.
(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
Initially two cranes will be used to lift the external tank from its horizontal position. Then the external tank will be slowly brought upright and one of the cranes will be disconnected. Next, the other crane will lift the tank to its final position.
The external tank will then be connected to components that were installed in recent months: the twin solid rocket boosters, which began installation in a months-long process that began over the summer. At liftoff, the white rocket boosters were positioned beneath the shuttle’s wings and produced more than 80% of the lift.
The 15-story orange external tank, the last of its kind in existence, arrived in Los Angeles in 2016, on a sea voyage through the Panama Canal to Marina del Rey, before also traveling the streets to the Science Center . During launches, the external tank carried propellants (liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen) that powered the space shuttle’s three main engines to help put the shuttle into orbit.
After the external tank is moved into position, work will begin to remove Endeavor from its existing display space, the temporary hangar known as the Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavor Pavilion, where the orbiter had been on display for approximately 11 years, until it closed. on New Year’s Eve.
The hangar is being dismantled to make way for the transfer of Endeavor. Later this month, Endeavor will begin being moved out of the hangar at the western end of the science center, Rudolph said.
It will first shoot on the grass just north of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and south of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
The orbiter will then move along State Drive. Movement will be complicated: at one point, the Endeavor will need to be jacked up (to avoid hitting a building), moved, and then lowered again for the rest of the trip.
An architectural drawing showing the design of the California Science Center’s future Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, which will house the space shuttle Endeavor, right next to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
(ZGF via California Science Center)
Weather permitting, Endeavor will make its own move to the site before the end of the month. Hopefully, that uprising will also be an overnight operation.
Once Endeavor is in place, the rest of the museum will be built around it, followed by the time it will take to install the exhibits. It could be a few years before the new museum is open to the public.
The shuttle project, estimated to cost $400 million, will reshape the skyline around the California Science Center, whose roots date back 110 years as a site to showcase agricultural and industrial projects. The site became the California Museum of Science and Industry in 1951 and reopened as the California Science Center in 1998.
The new wing of the aerospace museum is named for Samuel Oschin, the late Los Angeles businessman and philanthropist, whose name also appears on the planetarium at Griffith Observatory and the cancer institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Financial contributions from the Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Oschin Family Foundation have been transformative for the construction of the museum’s new wing, which broke ground in mid-2022.
The space shuttle’s arrival in California was a homecoming for Endeavor, which rolled off the Rockwell International production line in Palmdale in 1991, replacing Challenger, which exploded shortly after launch in 1986, killing all seven on board. . Southern California played a crucial role in the development of the shuttles, which injected hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy and became a source of pride for the region’s aerospace industry.
Endeavor flew 25 missions in space before its final flight in 2011, eight years after another shuttle, Columbia, disintegrated upon reentry in 2003, and the shuttle fleet was set to retire.
Among Endeavor’s most notable missions was successfully repairing the Hubble Space Telescope and helping to complete construction of the International Space Station.
