Check Out The Space Shuttle Enterprise On Display In VA

[NATO AIR]

wow, can't wait to see this in a few weeks when I go on leave. the smithsonian just gets better and better.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-gc21m43ig.20nov07,1,2572972.story?coll=chi-travel-hed

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Smithsonian's new outpost: A place for space

By Michael Kilian
Tribune staff reporter
Published November 7, 2004

CHANTILLY, VA.—For some of us, it indeed seems only yesterday that we clustered around black-and-white television screens in the spring and summer of 1961 to watch the pioneering Mercury space flights of Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom.

But space has become history, so much so they've even put one of the space shuttles in a museum.

It's the Enterprise, the first shuttle ever built and now the centerpiece of the Smithsonian's just opened James S. McDonnell Space Hangar exhibition hall at Washington's Dulles International Airport in suburban Virginia.

Containing 53,000 square feet of exhibition space and displaying 112 other major artifacts from mankind's climb into the celestial, the Space Hangar is an adjunct to the huge, 760,000 square foot Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center aviation museum that opened at Dulles last December.

Both are components of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, which will continue to operate its popular original facility on the capital's National Mall. The three combined make up the largest aviation and space history complex on the planet.

The Enterprise rolled out of its California assembly plant in 1976. It was initially to be called the Constitution in honor of the U.S. Bicentennial, but fans of the TV series "Star Trek" inundated the federal government with letters asking that it be named after the fictional space ship Enterprise, and the name was changed

In addition to being the first shuttle, the Enterprise has the distinction of never having actually flown in space. It flew a number of atmospheric test flights to prove that a space vehicle actually could be landed on a concrete runway, and was used for myriad other tests and training as well.

It went to the Paris Air Show and a world's fair.

But first-shuttle-in-space honors went to sister ship Columbia, which first launched in 1981 and flew 28 missions before breaking up over the American Southwest in the shuttle program's second disaster early last year. The Enterprise was used to test some of the theories pursued in the subsequent investigation.

Now restored to its original pristine condition after 17 years in storage—though some of its forward wing tiles have been removed for the Columbia investigation—the 150,000-pound Enterprise dominates the new Space Hangar like no other museum exhibit anywhere.

Visitors are not allowed aboard the shuttle, but there's not much to see inside anyway.

"It's empty," said Air and Space Museum director Jack Dailey on a preview tour of the hangar. "NASA pretty much stripped the ship."

But visitors can get within a few feet of the craft—"as close as you can get to a space shuttle," said curator Valerie Neal—gaining a very good idea of how small and confining a living space and working quarters a shuttle is for astronauts orbiting in it in space, and how huge and cumbersome a flight vehicle it must be for a space pilot attempting to land it.

Space history is on view in other forms. There's a tiny one-man space capsule from the Mercury program similar to that which carried Shepard into history in May 1961, and the pair of lunar overshoes Shepard wore when he became the first person ever to play golf on the moon in January, 1970.

The Gemini program that followed Mercury is represented by the cramped, two-man capsule in which astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell orbited the Earth for 14 days in 1965. (When they eventually emerged, Borman joked: "We're engaged.")

A bit more commodious is the trailer in which Apollo 11 crew Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were kept in quarantine after returning from the first ever landing on the moon. This precaution was taken because NASA feared they might have picked up strange "moon germs" that could infect inhabitants of the home planet.

Nearby is the form-fitting and comfy-looking centrifuge seat made especially for John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth.

Other historic exhibits include an Apollo program command module, with flotation collar and bags used to keep the module afloat after splashdown, as well as a paraglider capsule that was developed in search of a possible alternative to water landings.

Once the returning vehicle had safely entered the atmosphere and slowed to landing speed, the wings of the capsule would deploy in hang-glider fashion to allow the returning spacecraft to glide to a landing site. The thing worked, more or less, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided to continue with the highly successful water technique.

There also is a collection of spacesuits, including every one used to walk on the moon, along with a human-sized android NASA built in the 1960s to test spacesuits.

Ironically, much of the U.S. space program grew out of the German rocket program the Allies tried to destroy in World War II. A variety of such buzz bombs and other lethal rocketry are on view here too.

There are seemingly as many satellites hanging from the museum's lofty ceiling as there are overhead in space now.

One of them is a special reconnaissance satellite from the super secret National Imagery and Mapping Agency (which recently changed its name to National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency). In space, it fully extended to 200 feet in length and was used to photograph and map virtually every corner of the planet.

Among the other large objects is an entire 1953 U.S. Army Redstone rocket, designed to carry a nuclear warhead all of 200 miles; a huge instrument ring segment from a Saturn V rocket (one such ring withstood a lightning strike at liftoff and was able to get the missile spaceborne safely); and the main engine of a space shuttle.

As large if quite lighter is the portable space laboratory Skylab. Among the 500 some smaller artifacts on display is well-preserved "Anita," the spider carried aboard Skylab for observations on how weightless space flight affected web-spinning patterns.

There's even a small tube of space borscht carried by Soviet cosmonauts on their missions.

Plenty of space remains in the Space Hangar, which will gradually be filled with new additions to the collection over the next several years, according to Dailey, a retired Marine Corps general and former combat pilot.

The adjoining Udvar-Hazy aviation museum has 82 aircraft on display, including the Enola Gay World War II Superfortress atomic bomber, a Concorde supersonic airliner and an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. Next month, the Smithsonian will be adding 21 more aircraft to the Dulles facility, including a World War II-era Westland Lysander used to sneak secret agents into and out of enemy territory, and a Bell H-13J that was the first helicopter to be used by a U.S. president (Dwight Eisenhower).

The National Air and Space Museum facility on the National Mall, 28 miles east of Dulles, has some worthwhile space exhibits also, among them Glenn's orbiting Mercury spacecraft Friendship 7, the Apollo 11 command module Columbia and a touchable moonrock brought back by Eugene Cernan's Apollo 17 in 1972.
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