Fate of Space Shuttle Orbiters to be Revealed at 1:00 EDT Today
NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden will announce today where the agency will send the four remaining space shuttle orbiters as they are retired. The announcement will be made as part of a commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the first flight of the space shuttle at Kennedy Space Center, FL beginning at 1:00 pm EDT. The event will air live on NASA TV, and a media teleconference will be held at 3:00 pm EDT. The teleconference will be streamed live at http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio.
Six orbiters were built. Two were destroyed in accidents that claimed the lives of their crews: Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. One was built as an atmospheric test flight vehicle and was not designed for space flight. That orbiter, Enterprise, has been on display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center for several years, but many expect that the museum would prefer to display one that has flown in space, so is in the running for one of the other three. Those three — Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis — are prizes that many museums and NASA centers across the country are anxious to claim.
The suspense will be over this afternoon.
User Comments
SpacePolicyOnline.com has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor the comments and to remove any materials it deems inappropriate. We do not post comments that include links to other websites since we have no control over that content nor can we verify the security of such links.