Excitement was in the air Monday night when a team began the complex process of moving the NASA shuttle Endeavour into its vertical launch-ready position at the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center.
The shuttle was transferred from the Science Center in Exposition Park, only a couple hundred feet away from its new destination. Previously, the shuttle was displayed horizontally and was not attached to its iconic fuel tank and rocket boosters.
The new exhibit will make history as the first display of the shuttle in an upright “lift off” position. Rohin Pathak, co-lead of the Liquid Propulsion Laboratory and a graduate astronautical engineering student explained why this is significant.
“When you’re putting a shuttle upright and the way they’re constructing it, you’re going to have levels to it,” Pathak said. “So you can go onto level four and look into the cockpit, and you weren’t able to see that before when the shuttle was horizontal launch orientation.”
According to the installation curators, two cranes were used to position Endeavour upright between two solid rocket boosters and attached to a 65,000-pound external fuel tank known as ET-94.
The process began late Monday night and continued into Tuesday morning. Mounting the shuttle was a challenging task that had never been accomplished outside of a NASA facility.
Despite the public opening of the new center being years away, students like Gage Bachmann, an astronautical engineering major and a lead engineer at the USC Liquid Propulsion Laboratory, expressed their enthusiasm for the project.
“The fact that I can see it right out of my window and the fact that you can go to school where you can walk across the street and see the space shuttle for free is just awe-inspiring,” Bachmann said.
Other students felt lucky to be so close to the one-of-a-kind display.
“This is such a difficult thing to accomplish, and every day I get to drive by it and see it. I feel proud in a way that it’s right next to campus,” Pathak said. “I’m really excited in the next four years when it fully goes up to actually go in and take a look at it. It’s going to be awesome.”
Sebastian Bouckenooghe, another lead engineer at the USC Liquid Propulsion Laboratory and a graduate mechanical engineering student, said the Endeavour installation will likely inspire students and the greater Los Angeles community.
“I think all in all it’s nice to see something like that, especially given that nowadays Southern California is really turning into a hub for airspace work,” Bouckenooghe said. “Being able to have something like that right next to campus…everybody can be inspired.”
According to NASA, Endeavour embarked on a total of 25 missions between 1992 and 2011. Upon completion, the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center will give visitors a unique look at the world’s first reusable spacecraft, and the only shuttle displayed upright.