Posted 4/12/2011 05:34:00 PM by Douglas

Coming not as a surprise to anyone paying attention, the home of NASA's Mission Control Center will not be getting a retired space shuttle so fat tourists can walk around and gawk at it.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced today the four museums -- the Smithsonian Institution (Discovery), the California Science Center (Endeavour), Kennedy Space Center (Atlantis) and the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum (Enterprise) -- that will receive space shuttles for public display after the fleet retires this summer.

As expected Houston, the home of human spaceflight, was snubbed.

It's a shame. Houston's campaign, Bring the Shuttle Home, probably deserves some blame for being late to the game in terms of politicking for an orbiter.

But I'm not sure any campaign could have saved Houston. The politics of this decision were pretty clear. President Obama appoints the NASA administrator, and Texas is a decidedly Republican state.

Interesting to note that three of the four locations that received an orbiter, California, New York, and D.C., are the bluest of the blue states, and Florida is a swing state. Was there any push, politically, to make Texas happy? Of course not, which is why I'm surprised Ohio missed out, but I'll get to that.

It's political, duh. With the exception of Florida's latitude, the location of EVERY NASA center is political, so I can't fault Barry (via Charlie) for the political decision. Actually, I can give him a little credit for taking any common sense out of the decision and making it so clearly political, the motivation isn't even worth questioning.

But to the bigger question, does KSC/JSC even want one? Sure, it's a rich heritage of the agency's past and a huge accomplishment for the nation, but let's face it: It's a relic. It's getting mothballed because we're moving on to something, if not bigger, but better (try not to laugh). Don't we need to move on? Leave the relics to the museums and the bus loads of 4th graders that wanted to get out of class for the day, and let's get on with our business of building space ships and flying humans to the heavens. That's why I thought Ohio was such a great choice. Let the 40 year old orbiter corrode with the rest of the rust belt to remind the unemployed union workers why their factories are closed and why all their work has moved South or overseas.

It's a slap in the face to all the rocket scientists at JSC that there's an orbiter in LA, and another one a half a day's drive from the Smithsonian, but Houston needs to get back to work and let the historians worry about the relics.