With a decision looming on the fate of three retired shuttles, local boosters are counting on that heritage and Ohio’s long aviation legacy to help land a shuttle at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Tom Crouch, a Dayton native who grew up near the base and is now senior curator of aeronautics at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., said Dayton is uniquely qualified for a shuttle display.
“Dayton is the home of world aviation,” he said. “It’s the place were the airplane was invented and flight began with the Wright Brothers. You can see the space shuttle as just a very natural addition to that heritage at the Air Force museum, which is one of this nation’s great aerospace museums.”
The Dayton museum is among 21 facilities across the country vying for one of three decommissioned shuttles — Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. NASA will also award its first space shuttle prototype, Enterprise, to one of the contenders and will announce its final decisions on April 12, the 30th anniversary of the shuttle program’s first launch.
Mark Brown, a Dayton businessman and former astronaut, said Dayton deserves to be a shuttle retirement home because of the aerospace research pioneered here.
“A lot of people don’t remember, but Dayton and Wright-Patterson were essentially the Edwards’ test flight center back in the first half of the century,” he said.
Brown, who has flown on Discovery and Challenger, was referring to Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California, where almost every U.S. military aircraft has been tested since the 1950s.
That included flight tests in the 1960s and 1970s of so-called “lifting bodies,” whose design and dimensions were first conceived at Wright-Patterson. The lifting bodies could be launched to high altitudes, glide back to Earth and land like an aircraft, a prelude to the flight of modern-day shuttles.
“Ohio has been at the forefront of the space program from the very beginning,” Brown said. “We’re the home of Neil Armstrong and John Glenn and something like 20-plus astronauts that have been involved in the space program. And there’s a continuing history of research here that goes back to the dawn of flight and continues today with research being done on the next generation of space vehicles.”
The Air Force’s involvement in the space program is another reason Dayton would be a logical destination for a retired shuttle, Brown said.
He points out that the Air Force was instrumental in Congress’ establishment of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — the predecessor to NASA and the organization under which many of NASA’s current research facilities were established.
Those facilities included the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory, now the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
Louis Povinelli, a NASA scientist who from 1960 to 1968 conducted research on rocket engine combustion for the Apollo mission to the moon, said work at NASA Glenn was “absolutely essential in order for the success of the space shuttle.”
For example, researchers at the Cleveland center helped identify a flaw in a rocket booster that led to the fatal explosion of the Challenger shuttle in 1986 and later helped develop safer, more reliable rocket engines.
“We had a very, very active research program on liquid and solid propellant rocket combustion,” he said. “Now we have a whole spectrum of activities which support not only the construction of the vehicle and the propulsion of the vehicle, but also the experimental research that’s carried out on board. There have been many, many scientists here since 1960 who have devoted their time and effort to this.”
Povinelli recalls working closely with one of those scientists, William Gerstenmaier, who began his career at NASA Glenn in the 1970s and is now NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Operations.
Gerstenmaier reports to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who is solely responsible for making the final decision on where to locate the shuttles.
If Povinelli has any influence on the matter, the decision on where to send at least one of the shuttles is clear.
“I believe the (Air Force museum) is a natural and desirable location for one of the NASA shuttles,” he wrote in an email. “That decision, of course will be made by the appropriate people in D.C.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2437 or rtucker@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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