Endeavour then will travel through Inglewood and Los Angeles city streets on a 12-mile journey from the airport to the science center, arriving in the evening on Oct. 20.Īfter arrival at LAX, Endeavour will be removed from the SCA and spend a few weeks at a United Airlines hangar undergoing preparations for transport and display. The flight concludes with low-level flyovers of many Los Angeles sites prior to landing at Los Angeles International Airport at about 11 a.m. 20, the SCA and Endeavour will take off from Dryden and perform low-level flyovers in the Palmdale, Lancaster, and Rosamond areas before the SCA-Endeavour combo heads to Northern California for a loop around Sacramento, San Francisco and NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field near San Jose. 19, the aircraft will depart Houston, make a refueling stop at Biggs Army Airfield in El Paso, Texas, and conduct low-level flyovers of White Sands Test Facility near Las Cruces, N.M., and NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California, before landing around mid-day at Dryden. It's an amazing artifact."įor all of our Endeavour coverage, go to kpcc.At sunrise on Wednesday, Sept. It's unlike anything in our collection, and unlike anything that all but Smithsonian and a few other places like Kennedy Space Center have.
"It has absolutely every wear and tear mark revealing what it went through, the various phases of flight. "It’s an incredible teaching tool," says Phillips. If all goes well, in five years a specially-designed wing will house the shuttle, which will be mounted vertically, with real solid rocket boosters, an external fuel tank, and a reproduction gantry so viewers can get as close to its history as possible. In the meantime, Endeavour will be turned into an exhibit at the California Science Center.
#NASA SPACE SHUTTLE SACRAMENTO FREE#
And then NASA is free - which is their dream and mission - to go for more aggressive, deep space, exciting stuff, and ultimately build up to a human crew that lands on Mars." So they farmed out the low-earth-orbit to the commercial sector. "The reason the space shuttle was moth-balled is because NASA doesn't have the funding to maintain the shuttle as the main vehicle to get from the surface of Earth to low-earth orbit. "But NASA is by no means out of business," says Phillips. Endeavour is a pristine, space-worthy vehicle, retired well short of the 100 flights that each of the orbiters was built to fly. Then you put on 20,000 miles and somebody takes it away from you. "I look at it like this: when you buy a brand new Ferrari, it's rated for 100,000 miles on the engine. Phillips says Endeavour could have done much more. "From Endeavour's maiden voyage," says Phillips, "it did some pretty amazing things - in our opinion some of the most iconic missions ever flown in the shuttle program."Įndeavour was retired last year, when NASA ended the shuttle program after 30 years and 135 missions. Endeavour was also the first shuttle to carry a female African-American astronaut, Mae Jemison.
#NASA SPACE SHUTTLE SACRAMENTO SERIES#
They couldn't get the satellite to cooperate initially, so they had to improvise and create an effective way to do it, which they did."Īfter its first mission, Endeavour racked up a series of accomplishments, including becoming the first shuttle to make a repair mission to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and the first shuttle to deliver an American module to the International Space Station. "They had to rescue a stray satellite, bring it into the payload bay, repair it, and release it.
"By the time Endeavour flew, it was an extremely aggressive mission," says Phillips. Ken Phillips, California Science Center’s aerospace curator, says it made history on its maiden voyage. The Endeavour space shuttle was built in four years, and flew out on its first mission, STS-49, on May 7, 1992. In a nationwide contest, school children came up with "Endeavour," the name of the ship Captain James Cook sailed to the Sandwich Islands in the 1700s. They had parts left over from the construction of Discovery and Atlantis, and all their new shuttle needed was a name. The disaster was a grim day in NASA’s history, but engineers got to work quickly on a replacement. The history of Endeavour begins on January 28, 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight from Cape Canaveral, leading to the deaths of all seven crew members.
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