The Museum of Flight in Seattle found out Tuesday from NASA that it will not be the home of one of the four retired space shuttles.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the museum at Boeing Field will get a full-fuselage space shuttle
trainer.
The trainer is a shuttle orbiter minus the wings. It was used for astronaut training during the 30-year history of the space shuttle program and will stay in use until the shuttle program retires later this year. It’s the only one of its kind and was built at the Johnson Space Center in Texas in the 1970s.
The Seattle museum built a new 15,500-square-foot Space Gallery as part of its bid to land one of the retired shuttles.
Instead, visitors will have the opportunity to see the trainer, an amazing piece of space history.
The trainer is expected to arrive in Seattle by the end of the year and should be open for public viewing by spring, said Doug King, the museum’s CEO.
Museum officials still are determining exactly what the visitor’s experience will be like, but it’s expected to be interactive, King said.
The retired shuttles will find their permanent homes at four museums around the country: The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; the Kennedy Space Center in Florida; the California Science Center in Los Angeles; and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City.
The shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to make the final space flight in June.
Jackson Holtz: 425-339-3447; jholtz@heraldnet.com.
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