One interesting aspect of the exhibit is a short film that shows how the Endeavour as well as the fuel tank were delivered to the California Science Center. In order to de-orbit it had to do a barrel roll, and as a safety measure that began with the Endeavour it also had a parachute pop out the back to add additional drag. Seeing it up close the Endeavour looks like an airplane, but of course that’s completely misleading, and a sign in the museum points this out: after taking off straight up strapped to rockets, the wings were only there so it could land like an airplane… kind of. In the near future they plan to exhibit the Endeavour with the fuel tank and two mock solid rocket boosters, but the building for this is not complete.
The museum also has an external fuel tank outside. It was named in honor of a ship sailed by Captain Cook in the 18th century, hence the British spelling. In those days the Space Shuttle program was still in full swing and a replacement was needed - the Endeavour would be the last one ever built.Īnd yes, for the record it’s spelled “Endeavour,” not “Endeavor” despite the latter being the American English spelling of the word. The Endeavour was ordered in the wake of the Challenger disaster. Unfortunately two of the Space Shuttles didn’t make it - the Challenger blew up seconds after liftoff on its 10th mission in 1986, and the Columbia broke apart upon re-entry after its 28th mission in 2003. It was however the only part of the much more ambitious Space Transportation System (STS) program from the late 1960’s to actually get built and used, so it could also be argued it was a modest success from a certain vantage point of history. Looking back it’s easy to see the Space Shuttle program as a weird quirk of space travel history, or at worst as a total flop.
Today I went to the California Science Center - a free Los Angeles museum mostly aimed at kids - to see something pretty amazing: a Space Shuttle that flew 25 missions in space.