After the space shuttle Discovery made its final flight in February of 2011, its final resting place appeared to be the Udvar-Hazy Center, part of the Smithsonian Institute. The museum in northern Virginia is full of aerospace artifacts.
But the shuttle could be on the move once again. A provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in July, could move Discovery to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Dan Vergano, a senior editor at Scientific American, spoke to Texas Standard about the costs and risks of moving the spacecraft. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: So whose idea is this to move Discovery to Texas? I got to say, it smells a little bit like pork, so to speak.
Dan Vergano: It’s Sen. John Cornyn. Sen. Cruz, who is a very important person, Ted Cruz as you know, who was on the committee in the Senate that oversees NASA, is also sort of helping out. And they were the two major politicians behind this provision in the big, beautiful tax bill.
Well, I can understand the good reason why. I mean, Houston is synonymous with the space industry, but moving it is a big deal, and there’s a reason it wasn’t put there in the first place. Could you touch on that?
Yeah. In 2011, there was this decision after the retirement of space shuttles that we’re going to parcel the surviving ones out.
They went through this long process. There’s a long chart of who would offer the most support, who was the best museum to preserve it, all sorts – yada, yada. And at the end of the day, the numbers came out with the Smithsonian getting the top rating and that was how it just kind of fell out in the end.
Okay, so I mentioned moving this is a big deal. Why? Why is it so delicate? It doesn’t look delicate. It went to space a bunch of times.
Yeah, it’s wacky. I mean, it has been blasted off into space 39 times and fried coming back through the atmosphere. But it turns out that it’s 45 years old. The fuselage was built in 1980. It has been beaten up.
And the key thing is these tiles on it are really delicate. Each one individually, you could break it just by pushing on it with your finger. They’re mostly air. Consider it covered with eggshells, essentially. It’s covered with light bulbs. It is not a hard surface like an airplane. And it was never meant to be taken apart.
What we’re talking about now is, you know, “let’s slice the Mona Lisa up into six parts and then we’ll just glue it together and it’ll be great.”
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So Congress allocated $85 million to move the shuttle. That seems like a lot of money, but would it be enough?
Well, it depends on who you talk to. The senators have suggested it might only be $8 million talking to a moving company.
If you talk the NASA and the Smithsonian, they say that the cost of just moving it – and it’s unclear what manner they’re talking about moving – it would be somewhere between $120 and $150 million. And that’s just because you have to reconstitute all these capabilities to move it safely without destroying it that have all been scrapped – things like the hoists and cranes, the personnel, the training, and sort of de-accessing it from the Smithsonian without breaking it.
So this has been at the Smithsonian for years now. What’s that institution’s reaction to the possibility of having Discovery taken away?
Well, clearly they’re not happy about it. I mean, they have pointed out that they in fact own the thing, not NASA. And so just picking it up is, you know, not legal.
They are not talking to us though, of course, because the senators threatened them with an investigation. He actually asked the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who’s on the trustees board for the Smithsonian, to look into them, somehow putting their thumb on the scales and influencing a discussion about how much this will all cost and what bad idea it is.
So you got to decide who you trust. Do you trust a moving company from Texas or do you trust the Smithsonian on who has the right cost estimate for moving a priceless national artifact?
So what’s next here? I mean, are we expecting legal action or more back and forth in the media? What’s the idea?
Right. What’s next is it seems, from the reporting and letters we’ve seen, that [Office of Management and Budget] OMB orders NASA and the Smithsonian to cough it up. “Please deliver this space shuttle to this moving company at such and such an hour, at such-and-such a time.” And that will spark a whole bunch of action.
The Smithsonian will have to make a decision about whether they resist that legally, if they file a lawsuit. It’s not clear they will. Everyone who’s observant says they probably have legal standing since they own the thing to resist it.
On the other hand, 60-some percent of their budget comes from the federal government, and there’s great extortionary power from the senators. So they’ll have to make a call at that point.
Some other senators have put forward a bill trying to remove the funding or prohibit spending on this sort of move. And it’ll be a big mess.
Basically, the country will have to decide what side it comes down on in terms of this move.
