The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Shuttle would help inspire future aerospace industry workers, Seattle advocates say

Doug King, president and chief executive officer of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, gestures as he talked Wednesday near a space shuttle model in the lobby of the Museum of Flight.

Chuck Hamlin/CMG Doug King, president and chief executive officer of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, gestures as he talked Wednesday near a space shuttle model in the lobby of the Museum of Flight.

ENLARGE PHOTO

Man, 68, drowns at Caesar Creek Lake
5/26/12
Water rescues prompt warning from health officials
5/25/12
Beach Waterpark sued for failure to deliver
5/25/12
Raleigh Trammell’s defense opens in felony trial
5/25/12
UD to move satellite campus to Dublin
5/25/12
> More headlines

By John Nolan, Staff Writer Updated 10:55 AM Friday, April 8, 2011

SEATTLE — Bringing a space shuttle to Seattle’s Museum of Flight would be the keystone for educational displays and programs that include historic aircraft, research archives and hands-on flight simulators, the museum’s administrators say.

“These are important artifacts,” Mike Hallman, vice chairman of the museum’s board of trustees, said Thursday of the retiring orbiters that NASA is preparing to assign for permanent display at sites across the country. “They’re the Mona Lisas of aviation.”

The shuttle made it possible to carry components of the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station aloft and support countless experiments in orbit, Hallman noted.

“It has proved to be adaptable, useful and technologically advanced,” he said. “It’s an incredible story of people who planned and designed something that would be useful for decades into the future.”

In retirement, the shuttles can be used as educational tools to inspire the imaginations of young people about the possibilities that space exploration and science in general offer, he said.

“These are interesting careers. It’s a great opportunity to be creative, to define themselves,” Hallman said, recalling that the nation’s 1960s space successes inspired him to a career that included service with IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Boeing.

Unless a government shutdown occurs before then, NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. is to announce on Tuesday — the 30th anniversary of the first U.S. shuttle launch — which of 21 competing sites will be awarded the three shuttles and the similar-looking Enterprise, a test glider that wasn’t flown in space.

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, Florida’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Johnson Space Center’s Houston visitor center, Seattle’s Museum of Flight and New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum are considered among the stronger contenders.

The Seattle museum benefits from the neighboring presence of Boeing Co., a dominant U.S. builder of aircraft for nearly a century. The company is constantly flying planes from the next-door Boeing Field, including its newest jetliners.

Boeing has provided aircraft for long-term display at the Seattle museum, including an Air Force One that carried presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. It is a financial supporter of the museum. Bill Boeing Jr., son of the company’s founder, is a member of the museum’s board and donated to its collection the company’s original manufacturing facility, known as the Red Barn.

“This has been one of the major aerospace hubs in the country for a hundred years. We need to inspire young people to help fill those jobs,” said Doug King, the museum’s president and chief executive officer.

He came to the Museum of Flight on Jan. 1 after 15 years as president of the Saint Louis Science Center and previously establishing Challenger Learning Centers to promote science and space interests to young people around the country, including the one in Dayton.

The Museum of Flight’s education programs serve 140,000 young people annually, its officials said.

It is donating a nearby acre of land to build a new location for the Aviation High School, an existing aviation-focused high school that serves students from the Seattle region’s public schools. Museum personnel will teach classes at the school, which is to be completed in 2012.

Seattle’s boosters contend that if NASA seeks to evenly distribute the shuttles across the country, the city could be the West Coast’s display arena. The California Science Center in Los Angeles is making a similar argument. NASA spokesman Mike Curie has said, however, that diversity of geographic distribution may not necessarily be a priority for his agency.

Some sites with less-than-direct connections to the space program have tried to play up their potentially attractive or unique characteristics.

The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City, for example, has promoted its big-city population base and the fact that its home is the decommissioned USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier that once retrieved splashed-down Mercury and Gemini spacecraft from the Atlantic Ocean. Officials of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium have said they would build a glass pavilion, with views of Lake Michigan and the city’s skyline, to house a shuttle.

The museums, including the Air Force museum, have emphasized to NASA that they would use the orbiters in support of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education, a key interest of NASA’s.

NASA has quoted a price of $28.8 million per shuttle recipient, to cover costs of transporting and delivering the orbiters. The Museum of Flight would begin that fundraising from private supporters in earnest if it is awarded a shuttle, spokesman Mike Bush said. Museum administrators believe that private contributors will come through, he said.

The walls and roof of the Museum of Flight’s new 15,500-square-foot building are already up. It will house a shuttle if the museum gets one, otherwise it will be home to other space artifacts, museum officials said.

NASA has said that decommissioning and cleaning up the shuttles will take months, and orbiters Endeavour and Atlantis still are scheduled to make one more flight apiece. Discovery made its last flight earlier this year.

So, the recipients won’t be getting the shuttles until late this year or early in 2012.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2242 or jnolan@DaytonDailyNews.com.