Once more
with feeling
L.A. welcomes another
Space Shuttle artifact
By Mary Kanian and Julian Leek
Hollywood…the very name creates visions of stars…okay…
mostly ‘human stars.’ But every bit as popular throughout film history, ‘reaching for the stars’ has been a popular theme from comic
books to radio, TV and film. Buck Rogers, Superman and Flash Gordon stirred youthful imaginations with visions of interplanetary travel
and grasping for the stars ever since the Wright Brothers’ flying machine finally got us off the ground early in the last century.
The people of Los Angeles thronged the streets in 2012 to welcome the Space Shuttle Endeavour home to her birthplace, and
final showplace of honor at the California Science Center, located
in the heart of Los Angeles across the street from one of the country’s premier learning institutions, the University of Southern California, known as USC. Here she would be garaged until funding could
be raised to build a structure suitable to display her in a meaningful
way. That plan began to gel soon after her arrival, when fundraising
began.
The idea to display Endeavour in her stacked arrangement, as
they call it when the fuel tank and solid rockets are assembled and
attached to the orbiter, came about when NASA was looking to
scrap or salvage some of the many left-over Shuttle components
laying around unused. A rather sizeable one of these was one of
only two existing external fuel tanks left over from the concluded
Shuttle program.
One was a mock-up fuel tank, never designed to be flightworthy. NASA uses these mock-ups for study and training purposes,
especially useful should something go wrong, which indeed it did
when the Columbia broke during re-entry over Texas, effectively
dooming the Shuttle program.
The second fuel tank was flight-worthy and ready for use in the
next mission to be flown by Columbia.This same External Tank was
used to test the foam insulation that covers it to see if the bits of
it that sometimes broke loose during launch were in any way capable of damaging the leading edge of the orbiter wing. Scientists
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