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Dayton Business Journal
Fight over space
shuttle sites continues
by Joe Cogliano, DBJ Staff Reporter
Monday, April 18, 2011
Congress is getting into the fray over where the retired Space Shuttles
will be put on display, with one Senator calling for a federal
investigation of the site selection process by NASA and another
Congressman proposing a bill to take a shuttle from New York and give
it to Texas.
An effort is underway in Congress to take one of the retiring space
shuttles away from New York and send it to Texas.
Last week, U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, introduced the “Space
Shuttle Retirement Act,” which would make the Johnson Space Center in
Houston home to Endeavour.
“Despite the critical role that Texas has played in the space program,
it was overlooked by NASA as a final home for one of the four
orbiters,” Chaffetz said in a statement. “After hearing many of my
colleagues in Congress cry out: ‘Earth to NASA,’ I am seeking to
restore common sense and fairness to the Space Shuttle retirement home
debate.”
Under the bill, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum Steven
F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia would still get the Discovery and the
Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida would still get
Atlantis, but the California Science Center in Los Angeles would get
Enterprise instead of Endeavour.
The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York, which will was
supposed to house Enterprise, would be left out.
The National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base in Dayton was a finalist to land one of the space
shuttles. Despite free admission to the local museum and Dayton’s rich
history in the U.S. space program, the region was not awarded a shuttle.
NASA announced the original sites on April 12 and later that day U.S.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, called for a federal investigation over the
site selection process.
Brown and numerous other local officials are angry the museum did not
get a shuttle, in spite of high rankings in the criteria that NASA
supposedly used to choose sites.
Read the story with links at Dayton Business Journal
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