No shuttle? No problem. Space City’s new carrier aircraft exhibit soars

Independence sits atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

HOUSTON—It was the bitterest of pills for Houston, the home of human spaceflight. This is the city Neil Armstrong hailed, by name, after the lunar module reached the surface of the Moon. And more than that, however, thousands of technicians, engineers, and flight directors had managed the space shuttle program from Houston for three decades. They designed the shuttle, tested it, and operated it. They loved those vehicles and mourned when 14 neighbors lost their lives during two accidents.

And then, in April 2011, the city of astronauts learned the bitter truth. The retiring space shuttles would go to museums in Washington, DC, New York, and Los Angeles plus a visitor’s center at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Houston’s prize? A pair of flown space shuttle seats.

For the city and more specifically Space Center Houston, the official visitor’s center for Johnson Space Center that had made a bid for a shuttle, it was a humbling moment. “We are really disheartened,” the visitor center’s president, Richard Allen, said at the time.

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