“There are probably 10 places that deserve the space shuttle and we only had three,” said Gregory H. Johnson, a NASA shuttle astronaut and retired Air Force colonel who was on hand for the arrival. The trainer, however, prepared more than 300 astronauts, 75 of them from the Air Force, to fly in space.
“It’s the training camp,” said Johnson, a graduate of Park Hills High School in Fairborn. “It’s the real thing. There are only a few of these big simulators around and a lot of people didn’t get anything.”
Over the next year, the museum will build a mock-up of a payload bay and a tail section and temporarily house the exhibit in the Cold War Gallery until a new, $48 million hangar is built in 2014.
Jack Hudson, museum director and a retired three-star Air Force general, said he expects the arrival will bring more visitors to the iconic museum, which attracted about 1.2 million visitors last year, but the exact number is hard to predict.
“Attendance will grow,” he said. “We know it will.”
Crews will slide open the nose of the Super Guppy this morning and take several hours to unload the 23,000- pound trainer. The historic artifact will be displayed Friday near the hangar doors of the Cold War Gallery.
The four-engine Super Guppy, with a bulbous-shaped, silver upper fuselage, a middle blue stripe and a white underbelly, landed about an hour later than scheduled on the museum’s 7,200-foot-long runway. The crew was delayed by a longer-than-expected refueling stop at Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas and headwinds, mission officials said. Hundreds of people lined a fence and watched on a nearby hill as the odd-shaped, one-of-a-kind plane soared overhead.
For Gregory C. Johnson, a NASA astronaut and one of the plane’s co-pilots, the trainer has both a national and a personal career history.
“It’s a little nostalgic because we did a lot of things in that,” the retired naval aviator said.
The emotion of bringing a retired space shuttle orbiter to the museum remains strong for some.
“I think it’s great but I wish we would have gotten the shuttle instead,” said Ken Huck, 56, of Beavercreek, who toured the museum on Wednesday with fellow visitor Mike Michaud, 49, of Denver, Colo.
Retired shuttles now call home the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the California Science Center in Los Angeles, and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City landed the Enterprise, flown in atmospheric test flights but which never rocketed into space. Huck, a Wright-Patterson flight engineer and former NASA co-op student, said two shuttles on the East Coast within an hours-long drive of each other wasn’t fair when the Air Force museum was passed over.
“New York City ripped us off,” he said, with a laugh.
Lin Erickson, the Air Force Museum Foundation’s chief development officer, touted the arrival as a gain because once a payload bay and tail assembly are constructed patrons can climb inside and see how things work rather than view a space artifact from a distance.
The payload will contain an Air Force missile detection satellite that never launched, according to museum curator Doug Lantry.
When the new hangar opens, an amphitheater will be built near the shuttle trainer to explain science, technology, engineering and math concepts to visitors.
“I think what we’ll create will be a much cooler experience and far superior,” Erickson said.
The trainer did have fans.
Jeff Falkenstein, 49, of Logan, Ohio, and an Air Force veteran, made his first jaunt to the museum Wednesday, and planned to stay to see the artifact’s arrival.
“It will be very historical to see it come in,” he said. “I’m hoping it will bring a lot more people to see it.”