by At long last, the final journey of the last space shuttle ever built, Endeavour, and its giant orange outer tank are expected to begin this month – the cornerstone of a historic journey to an ambitious museum exhibition in Los Angeles.
It will be a particularly important event for the California Science Center, the state-run museum just south of downtown LA, which is building the 20-story Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center to house Endeavour. Anticipation has been building for more than a decade for the museum’s new wing, following NASA’s decision in 2011 to send Endeavor to LA and the orbiter’s cross-country trip in 2012, flying over the Hollywood sign before embarking on a journey three days through the streets of the city. to his new home.
Unlike any other exhibit featuring a retired space shuttle, Endeavor in LA will be configured in a full steel setup, pointing at the stars, as if ready to launch.
Barring any weather delays, starting next week, the giant 65,000-pound, 154-foot-long orange outer tank is expected to be moved and then raised from its current horizontal position to a vertical orientation, where it is attached to the already installed solid rocket booster.
Then, no sooner than the end of the month, the space shuttle orbiter itself, Endeavour, will be lifted from its horizontal position to its vertical position, and attached to the outer tank. This is the first time a shuttle designed for space has been assembled vertically outside a NASA or Air Force facility.
The operation will be a sight to behold, with key moments of the outer tank lift and Endeavor being streamed online by the California Science Center. The cranes that will lift the spacecraft are quite tall – the tallest of them will be about the height of City Hall.
“Show time!” said Jeffrey Rudolph, president of the California Science Center.
A preview of the large external tank lift is scheduled for Jan. 10, when self-propelled modular carriers — like those used to move Endeavor through city streets in 2012 — will move it down State Drive to the new museum wing. construction site. The trip will take about two hours, past the science center and the Exposition Park Rose Garden.
Then, on the evening of January 11 and into the following morning, the outer tank is to be built, starting sometime after 10 pm As the move is taking place outside, any delays could result significant wind, and the museum does not need a very large object swinging from a crane in significant wind.
“The trend, at least in December, was for the winds to go away around 10 pm and pick up again around 4 am Assuming it’s early January, we’ll try to take advantage of take that six-hour window to lift the tank and put it in the hole,” said Dennis Jenkins, project director for the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center.
Two cranes will initially be used to lift the outer tank from its horizontal position. Next, the outer tank will be slowly turned upright in a vertical direction, and one of the cranes will be disconnected. The other crane will then lift the tank into its final position.
The outer tank will then be attached to components 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 placed under the shuttle’s wings and more than 80% of the lift was produced.
Read more: Successful takeoff: Space shuttle Endeavor rockets are installed
The 15-story orange outer tank, the last of its kind, arrived in Los Angeles in 2016, on a sea voyage through the Panama Canal and into Marina del Rey, before also making its way through the streets to the Science Center. During launch, the outer tank carried propellants—liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen—that powered the space shuttle’s three main engines to help propel the shuttle into orbit.
After the outer tank is in place, work will begin to move Endeavor out of its existing display space, the temporary hangar known as the Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Effort Pavilion, where the orbiter has been on display for about 11 years, until it closed. on New Year’s Eve.
The hangar is being dismantled to make way for Endeavour’s transfer. Later this month, Endeavor will begin moving out of the hangar, on the western edge of the science center, Rudolph said.
It will first roll on the lawn just north of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and south of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Then, the orbiter will move down State Drive. The move will be difficult: At one point, Endeavor will have to be jacked up – to avoid a building – moved and then put back down for the rest of the trip.
Weather permitting, before the end of the month, Endeavor will bring its own lift into operation. Hopefully that lift will also be a one-night operation.
Once Endeavor is up and running, the rest of the museum will be built around it, followed by the time it takes to install 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 showcase for 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 aerospace museum wing is named for Samuel Oschin, the late Los Angeles businessman and philanthropist, who also bears his name on the Griffith Observatory planetarium and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center cancer institute. Financial contributions from the Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Oschin Family Foundation have been transformed into the construction of the museum’s new wing, which broke ground in mid-2022.
The arrival of the space shuttle to California was a homecoming for Endeavour, 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 vital role in the development of airplanes, injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy and becoming the pride of the region’s aerospace industry.
Endeavor flew 25 missions in space before its final flight in 2011, eight years after the retirement of the shuttle Columbia, on re-entry in 2003, and the shuttle fleet was set to retire.
Endeavor’s most notable missions included the successful repair of the Hubble Space Telescope and assisting in the overall construction of the International Space Station.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
