The Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum could lose the iconic Discovery space shuttle to Houston if a pair of Texas senators get their way.
President Donald Trump’s massive tax and immigration bill passed the Senate on Tuesday with language effectively ordering the shuttle’s move to Texas. It would set aside $85 million to transport Discovery and construct a home for it at Space Center Houston, the official visitor center for NASA’s Johnson Space Center – which itself oversaw more than 100 shuttle launches over three decades.
But the Smithsonian, which has housed the shuttle at its Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Northern Virginia since 2012, estimated that the true cost would be north of $300 million. That includes the cost of the transfer, the new facility to house it, prep for an alternative museum display at the Smithsonian and other related costs.
The House approved the bill on Thursday afternoon, and Trump is expected to sign it into law.
More than a dozen years ago, NASA chose the final resting places of Discovery and its three siblings after the agency ended the space shuttle program. Notably, none of the four winning sites were in Texas – a decision that was decried as a “snub” by 16 members of Texas’s congressional delegation at the time and continues to rankle the state’s Senate Republicans, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, who backed the new provision.
Cornyn said in a statement that he looks “forward to welcoming Discovery to Houston and righting this egregious wrong.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Cornyn called the Smithsonian’s cost estimate “purposefully overblown,” adding that “an outside vendor skilled at moving military equipment like tanks, military aircraft larger than a space shuttle, and the shuttle mock-up has estimated the total cost to be between $5-$8 million.” That cost estimate, the spokesperson said, includes transporting the shuttle from the Smithsonian to a barge, the trip on the barge to Houston (via the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico) and the transfer from the barge to Space Center Houston.
Others, including former astronauts, said moving Discovery from its current home in the D.C. suburbs doesn’t make sense – in large part because the highly modified Boeing 747 originally used to transport the shuttles piggyback-style is no longer available. When the shuttle arrived at the Smithsonian by air in 2012, preparations for the transfer took nearly a year.
“I’m not even sure how this could be accomplished,” John Grunsfeld, a veteran of five shuttle flights who served as NASA’s chief scientist, said in an email to The Washington Post.
Discovery’s voyage to the Smithsonian museum in 2012 was relatively simple compared with the journeys of other shuttles, in part due to the facility’s proximity to Washington Dulles International Airport. In Los Angeles, 400 trees were cut down to clear a path for the last leg of Endeavour’s trip to the California Science Center.
“I’m not even sure exactly how they would go about transferring it all the way to Houston without that airplane,” said Garrett Reisman, a former astronaut who flew on the Discovery and called the proposal “ludicrous and unnecessary.”
Democrats in Congress have echoed those criticisms as the bill has progressed, and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) unsuccessfully sought to strip the space-shuttle language from the bill.
A spokesperson for NASA declined to comment.
A document circulated among some members of Congress by the Smithsonian, and viewed by The Post, cites a cost estimate by the former NASA program manager who coordinated the 2011 relocation of the entire shuttle fleet. The document said the cost to transport Discovery to Houston would be about $35 million by air and ground or $40 million by barge and ground.
The Smithsonian also said in a statement that given the “extremely complex and difficult” move, the threat of damage to the spacecraft would be “significant.”
“Any time you transport any kind of museum object of that size, there’s always a threat of damage, one way or another,” said Edward McManus, a former conservator at the National Air and Space Museum, who opposes the transfer.
The move by the Texas senators, who originally proposed a separate bill in April to transfer the space shuttle, sets up a fight between two of the most prominent aerospace education centers in the country – a battle that at least some in the space community find harmful.
“I would much rather see that money invested in NASA’s science program,” Reisman said, especially given how sharply the White House wants to cut the agency’s research funding. “If you’re going to cut that and then cough up hundreds of millions of dollars into this for what is essentially a political mission – two senators who are concerned only about what’s best for their state and not what’s best for the country – I find that to be just a travesty.”
For the Smithsonian, the potential transfer of a key installation would be “unprecedented,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Discovery’s presence at the Smithsonian is part of the Institution’s core function as a research facility and object library.”
But at Space Center Houston, which would construct a building to accommodate the shuttle, news that it could soon house the spacecraft is a point of deep honor and pride. “It’s part of the DNA of our region,” said William Harris, the president and CEO of the museum. Having the space shuttle “holds a special meaning for people from Houston.”
As the site of the Johnson Space Center, the city has played a central role in NASA’s space programs since the agency was founded in the early 1960s.
“Houston has long stood at the heart of America’s human spaceflight program, and this legislation rightly honors that legacy,” Cruz said in a statement.
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