The Enterprise - a shuttle that was used only for landing training and as a spare parts warehouse will be on display starting next month at a new aviation and space museum in Virginia
Avi Blizovsky
The first space shuttle is now a museum exhibit. The shuttle Enterprise, built by Rockwell International in Palmdale, California in 1976, has been moved to the McDonnell Space Hangar at the new Odbar-Haisey Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport in northern Virginia.
The shuttle will be the main attraction in the hangar. says museum initiator Valerie Neal. "When the museum is fully populated it will have another 125 missiles, launchers and planes as well as several satellites, several telescopes and many small objects."
Although the vessel is called a shuttle, Enterprise has never been in space. In 1977 the instrument was put into service at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center. Enterprise was primarily an experimental vehicle that gave the pilots landing experience in preparation for the actual shuttle flights and allowed NASA to perform vital tests on systems and performance characteristics.
Since the flight of Columbia in April 1981, Enterprise has become a museum exhibit, when it appeared, for example, at the Paris Air Show in 1983 and at other sites in Europe. She was also the main attraction at the World's Fair held in 1984 in New Orleans and even though she has been stored since 1986 at Dulles, she made it possible to solve problems with the shuttle program. Each wing was missing a section when the craft was towed into the hangar.
"A section of the leading edge of the wing is missing," Neal said, "because NASA borrowed the starboard after the Columbia disaster to use them for the crash wall." Also missing for the same reason are panels from the front end of the two wings that were used to measure the effect of a foam impact. They will be returned to us in the coming year." said. Museum officials said that the spacecraft served as a spare parts bank for the other shuttles for many years.
The museum is expected to open on December 15 and will contain many items that have not yet been seen in museums, such as the complete Enola-Gay plane - the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan during World War II.
