![]() Congress had authorized the construction of Endeavour in 1987 as a replacement for the Space Shuttle Challenger, which had been lost in a tragic accident shortly after liftoff a year earlier. In many ways, Los Angeles was an obvious choice. A total of twenty-one museums entered the unofficial competition, with the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City, and the California Science Center being selected as the permanent homes of the remaining Space Shuttle fleet. to decide.Ĭities from New York to Seattle, Chicago to Houston, all threw their names into the hat and made pitches as to why they should be selected. ![]() The original test shuttle, Enterprise, was already on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum but the fate of the additional three crafts – Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour – was left to NASA administrator Charles F. Bush in 2003, it was decided that the remaining Shuttles would be given to museums around the country after they had been retired. ![]() When the end of the Space Shuttle program was announced by President George W. The craft carried the first female African American astronaut – Mae Jemison – into the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere in September 1992, and was the first Space Shuttle to service the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993. During its nineteen years of service, Endeavour flew 122,833,151 miles and spent 299 days in space. During the weekend of October 12, 2012, residents of Los Angeles lined the streets of their city in anticipation of a spectacle that had never been seen before – the Space Shuttle Endeavour winding its way down highways and through neighborhoods as the craft made its way from Los Angeles International Airport to the California Science Center in Exhibition Park.Įndeavour completed its final mission to the International Space Station a mere sixteen months earlier, on June 1, 2011, its twenty-fifth flight overall.
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