9.07.2025

Texas lawmakers are a step closer to snatching away the National Air and Space Museum's prized space shuttle and moving it from Northern Virginia to Houston.

A provision tucked into the massive tax and spending bill passed by Congress earlier this month provides $85 million to relocate Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Northern Virginia, where it has been on display since 2012. The money ostensibly would pay for the move and construction of a new building to display it at NASA's Johnson Space Center Visitor Center, though cost estimates to do so are several times higher.

“Houston has long been the cornerstone of our nation's human space exploration program and it's long overdue for Space City to receive the recognition it deserves by bringing the Space Shuttle Discovery home,” said Sen. John Cornyn, who wrote the measure with the support of fellow Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

Not so fast, counters the Smithsonian Institution, which is fighting to keep its prized shuttle near the nation's capital, where it is viewed by more than 1 million visitors every year.

Transporting Discovery would be enormously complicated since the two modified Boeing 747s that carried space shuttles mounted on their roofs are themselves museum pieces. Museum officials claim moving the shuttle by land and barge would cost more than $300 million and risk damaging the orbiter.

“It would be unprecedented for Congress to remove an object from a Smithsonian collection and send it somewhere else,” the Smithsonian, which receives about 60% of its funding from the federal government, said in a memo to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. 

The memo also noted that ownership of Discovery was transferred by NASA to the Air and Space Museum. “The Smithsonian does not manage our collections as government property subject to federal property disposal rules; our records, policies, and procedures treat them as 'trust' objects subject to Smithsonian control.”

And the museum's namesake has also weighed in. Hazy told Aviation Week in an email on July 7 that the Smithsonian owns the shuttle and that Texas and NASA “do not have a legal right to transplant Discovery to Houston.” He also noted that the 747 carriers were no longer operational.

Johnson Space Center, home to human mission operations and the NASA astronaut corps, played a major role in the 1981-2011 shuttle program. Texas lawmakers have long chafed at not being given an orbiter for public display after the vehicles were retired due to safety concerns.

In addition to Discovery, Atlantis is displayed at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Merritt Island; Endeavour is at the California Science Center in Los Angeles; and the prototype Enterprise, which never flew in space, is at the Intrepid Museum in New York. Two other shuttles, Challenger and Columbia, were destroyed during fatal accidents in 1986 and 2003, respectively.

Atlantis is the only orbiter still owned by NASA.

Quelle: AVIATION WEEK