Decommissioning the Shuttle

[Gerald Tarrant]

A pictorial essay of the Process on The Atlantic's website Link

I'm a bit of a hardware junkie, so seeing the insides of the various parts, and the custom cranes and rigs for assembly is neat.

[Phantasee]

That was depressing.

Thanks for the link, though. It was nice seeing the parts we didn't see before.

[Purple]

I hope they keep one for a museum or something.

[Phantasee]

If you read the captions, it tells you where each shuttle is going. They're all going to museums or public displays around the country.

[Gerald Tarrant]

Captions on picture 35 said they'd have one of the Shuttles in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Virginia, and the other one at the Kennedy Visitor Center, so I guess they're keeping both, just minus the parts that can explode, and burn and infect people with cosmic rays and such. Er, and Phat beat me to it.

[Phantasee]

I think it's mostly the toxic fuel that needs to be scrubbed off.

[Winston Blake]

I didn't know Space Shuttle orbiters had giant Christmas tree baubles inside them.

You learn something new every day.

[PeZook]

Punting this to History, because it's genuinely interesting.

[Thanas]

This is as depresssing as watching the France go to the breakers.

[MKSheppard]

I think it's mostly the toxic fuel that needs to be scrubbed off.

Can't be. If it was just that, then a surface scrub and clean would have done it. Certain parts of the Shuttle's structure, mainly the fuel tanks for the OMS/RCS have been soaking in hypergolic propellants for the last 30 years for months on end; and there's no real way to safely decontaminate them to the required level of cleanliness for a museum setting.

So the tanks have to be removed and cut up and buried in a desert wasteland for safety, with replicas installed.

[Skylon]

So the tanks have to be removed and cut up and buried in a desert wasteland for safety, with replicas installed.

Partially. The OMS and Forward RCS were stripped down at White Sands. The OMS pods and RCS have been returned and will be reattached to their respective orbiters, but they are shells. Everything that made them function is gutted. I think the APU's will be retained, and have just been drained.

The only major components that will be replicas are the SSME's (and even those are fabricated out of older, scrapped shuttle engine nozzles), less for safety and more for future use on SLS. Discovery I think actually is retaining those bulb-shaped tanks. The Smithsonian wanted her as intact as possible, and NASA felt one Shuttle should serve as a "vehicle of record". Atlantis and Endeavour are donating a lot more elements of their propulsion systems.

On another note, Discovery has been rolled into the Smithsonian, and looked every bit the veteran for 39 space flights, as it was next to its prototype sister, Enterprise: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts133/120419/