Endeavour finally reaches permanent LA museum home

ALICIA CHANG

CHRISTOPHER WEBER

AP Sci­ence Writer

LOS ANGELES — It was sup­posed to be a slow but smooth jour­ney to retire­ment, a parade through city streets for a shut­tle that logged mil­lions of miles in space.

But Endeavour’s final mis­sion turned out to be a logis­ti­cal headache that delayed its arrival to its museum rest­ing place by about 17 hours.

After a 12-mile trek through city streets that included thou­sands of ador­ing onlook­ers, flash­ing cam­eras and even the film­ing of a TV com­mer­cial, Endeav­our arrived at the Cal­i­for­nia Sci­ence Cen­ter Sun­day to a greet­ing party of city lead­ers and other dig­ni­taries that had expected it many hours earlier.

The Endeav­our was still inch­ing toward a hangar on the grounds of the museum mid-Sunday afternoon.

“It’s like Christ­mas!” said Mark Behn, 55, a mem­ber of the museum ground sup­port team who watched the shuttle’s snail­like approach from inside the hangar. “We’ve waited so long and been told so many things about when it would get here. But here it is, and it’s a dream come true.”

Orga­niz­ers had planned a slow trip, say­ing the space­craft that once orbited at more than 17,000 mph would move at just 2 mph in its final voy­age through Ingle­wood and south­ern Los Angeles.

But that esti­mate turned out to be gen­er­ous, with Endeav­our often creep­ing along at a barely detectable pace when it wasn’t at a dead stop due to difficult-to-maneuver obsta­cles like trees and light posts.

Another delay came in the early morn­ing hours Sun­day when the shuttle’s remote-controlled wheel car­rier began leak­ing oil.

Despite the holdups, the team charged with trans­port­ing the shut­tle felt a “great sense of accom­plish­ment” when it made it onto the museum grounds, said Jim Hen­nessy, a spokesman for Sarens, the con­tract mover.

“It’s his­toric and will be a great mem­ory,” he said. “Not too many peo­ple will be able to match that, to say ‘we moved the space shut­tle through the streets of Ingle­wood and Los Angeles.’”

Such a move is not cheap. The cross-town trans­port was esti­mated at $10 mil­lion, to be paid for by the sci­ence cen­ter and pri­vate donations.

Late Fri­day, crews spent hours trans­fer­ring the shut­tle to a spe­cial, lighter tow­ing dolly for its trip over Inter­state 405. The dolly was pulled across the Man­ches­ter Boule­vard bridge by a Toy­ota Tun­dra pickup, and the car com­pany filmed the event for a com­mer­cial after pay­ing for a per­mit, turn­ing the entire scene into a movie set com­plete with spe­cial light­ing, sound and staging.

Sat­ur­day started off promis­ing, with Endeav­our 90 min­utes ahead of sched­ule. But accu­mu­lated hur­dles and hic­cups caused it to run hours behind at day’s end.

Some 400 trees had been removed along the route, but offi­cials said most of the trees that gave them trou­ble could not be cut down because they were old or trea­sured for other rea­sons, includ­ing some planted in honor of Mar­tin Luther King Jr.

The crowd had its prob­lems too. Despite tem­per­a­tures in the mid-70s, sev­eral dozen peo­ple were treated for heat-related injuries after a long day in the sun, accord­ing to fire officials.

But it was a happy, peace­ful crowd, with fire­fight­ers hav­ing only to respond to a sheared hydrant and a small rub­bish fire, and no reports of any arrests.

And despite the late prob­lems the mood for most of the day was festive.

At every turn of Endeavour’s stop-and-go com­mute through urban streets, a con­stel­la­tion of spec­ta­tors trailed along as the space shut­tle plod­dingly nosed past stores, schools, churches and front yards as it inched through working-class streets of south­ern Los Angeles.

Endeav­our may have cir­cled the globe nearly 4,700 times, but its roots are grounded in Cal­i­for­nia. Its main engines were fab­ri­cated in the San Fer­nando Val­ley. The heat tiles were invented in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Its “fly-by-wire” tech­nol­ogy was devel­oped in the Los Ange­les sub­urb of Downey.

It’s no longer shiny and sleek like when it first rolled off the assem­bly line in the Mojave Desert in 1991 to replace the lost Chal­lenger. As it cruised block-by-block, it’s hard to miss what 123 mil­lion miles in space and two dozen re-entries can do to the exterior.

Stephanie Gibbs, a long­time Ingle­wood res­i­dent, passed the Forum, the for­mer home of the Los Ange­les Lak­ers, many times in her life. But she wasn’t pre­pared for what she saw Saturday.

“There was a space shut­tle block­ing the street and I said, ‘Whoa,’” she said.

Gibbs, who lives off Cren­shaw Drive, the nar­row­est sec­tion of the move, would like to see a sign des­ig­nat­ing it as a shut­tle crossing.

“We’ve been on the map” because of the Lak­ers, she said. “This kind of high­lights it more.”

Posted by AP News on Oct 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.