Atlantis is bound for display at the Kennedy Space Center's Visitors Complex. De-commissioning work on Endeavour and then Atlantis will be finished shortly thereafter, in staggered shifts. "It's considered in transition to retirement."ĭiscovery should be ready for transport to the Smithsonian by January or February, Beutel said. "Discovery, as of early May, officially is considered no longer a flight-status shuttle," Beutel told. 2, where it is being readied for display at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Discovery sits right next door to Endeavour, in Orbital Processing Facility No. The agency has already begun the transition work on the shuttle Discovery, which wrapped up its final mission, STS-133, in March. The decommissioning work, while not old hat for NASA, is not unprecedented, either. NASA will keep the original ones, which could be useful references in the design or testing of new equipment, officials have said. The parts will then be reattached to Endeavour at KSC, though the main engines will be replicas. Twenty years from now, we don't want some sort of piping to degrade and suddenly drip hydrazine on people." "They're completely flushing out the system. "This is for 'museum-clean,'" said Allard Beutel, NASA spokesman at Kennedy Space Center. These parts will be shipped to a NASA facility in White Sands, N.M., for thorough decontamination. They'll remove the thruster system inside the shuttle's nose, for example, as well as the big engines on either side of its tail. When that's done, workers will begin the decommissioning process in earnest, taking some of Endeavour apart. These activities should take several weeks, NASA officials said. 1 at Kennedy Space Center for technicians to begin removing supplies and cargo, as they would following any shuttle mission. Shortly after landing, Endeavour was rolled into Orbiter Processing Facility No. And it will begin almost immediately, NASA officials said. Transforming Endeavour from a flight-ready shuttle into a museum specimen is an involved process that will take months. (Image credit: NASA/Mike Kerley and Tony Gray) EDT on Jto end the STS-134 shuttle mission. Xenon lights illuminate space shuttle Endeavour's unfurled drag chute as the vehicle rolls to a stop on the Shuttle Landing Facility's Runway 15 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the final time.
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