“Why wouldn’t we get one? We live and breathe the space program here,” Bill Moore, chief operating officer of the visitor complex, said Monday. “It is the Space Coast, after all. People here are very proud of that.”
The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is among 21 organizations vying for NASA’s three orbiters, which will be retired this year. A test shuttle that never flew in space also will become available. The competing organizations include the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Smithsonian Institution, Space Center Houston, Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, Seattle’s Museum of Flight, and the California Science Center in Los Angeles.
NASA is to announce on April 12, the 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle flight, who will receive the orbiters for permanent display.
NASA should assign one of the shuttles to the Kennedy site because of its intimate relationship with the space program and its unassailable history as site of all 133 shuttle launches, said Alan M. Lovelace, who was NASA’s interim administrator when the space agency launched its first shuttle in 1981.
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum should also get a shuttle because of Washington’s role in funding and guiding the space program and because of the Smithsonian’s role in telling the nation’s history, including space exploration, Lovelace said.
But after those two sites, Lovelace, 81, now retired and living on Merritt Island, Fla., near the space center, said he thinks the Air Force museum should be next in line to receive an orbiter. The Air Force museum does an outstanding job of showing how technological developments relate to capabilities of aircraft and spacecraft, said Lovelace, a former chief scientist of what was then known as the Air Force Materials Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
“People forget that the shuttle program wasn’t just a NASA program. NASA was the lead agency. But the Air Force was very much a partner,” he said Monday in an interview at his home, referring to the Air Force’s $8 billion in support for the shuttle program, including engineering, design and testing support.
Delaware North Cos., a $2 billion-a-year business that operates the Kennedy visitor center, said it expects to cover NASA’s $28.8 million cost for preparation, transport and delivery of a shuttle from company revenues generated by admission, food and retail sales at the visitor center, plus a loan if needed. No taxpayer dollars would be involved, the company said.
The company used a similar in-house funding plan to finance prior exhibits, including the Shuttle Launch Experience and the Apollo/Saturn V Center, spokeswoman Andrea Farmer said.
Rob Varley, executive director of Florida’s Space Coast Office of Tourism, had publicly complained last year that Florida wasn’t doing enough to lobby for a shuttle. But he thinks Delaware North’s proposal is solid and shows that his region is better organized now in its push.
“They’ve got all that ready to go, so we feel pretty comfortable,” Varley said.
The space center benefits from being an easy drive from Walt Disney World, near Orlando, and has beaches nearby. And the cost for shuttle prep and delivery would likely be lower for the space center because that price includes NASA transport aboard a 747 plane, which wouldn’t be necessary since the shuttles are already at Kennedy.
“They are clearly among the strongest contenders, based on what I call common-sense criteria,” said Michael Gessel, a Dayton Development Coalition vice president who is promoting selection of the Air Force museum.
NASA has told the competing sites that its review includes assessing each location’s number of visitors, plans for displaying the orbiter, ability to receive it by 747 transport, and how the shuttle will be featured in science and education programs for the viewing public.
Florida’s elected officials have written to NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr., the decision-maker, emphasizing Cape Canaveral’s long and intimate association with the shuttle program.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., a former shuttle astronaut, suggested that assigning a shuttle to its Florida home would be timely.
“With the planned retirement of the space shuttle, the last year has been arguably one of the toughest for the entire NASA community, but this turmoil has been especially hard in central Florida where many of the job losses will be felt,” Nelson wrote in a March 14 letter to Bolden. “The addition of an orbiter to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center would help provide a much needed boost for both the morale of the work force and the economy of the area.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2242 or jnolan@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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