Officials push for shuttle's return to AV

Valley Press on ^ | Tuesday, February 5, 2008. | JIM SKEEN

[BenLurkin]

PALMDALE - The space shuttle fleet is slated to retire in 2010, and Palmdale officials believe they can offer one of the orbiters a worthy home in the high desert. City officials are pushing the idea of bringing one of the spacecraft to a former B-1B bomber manufacturing hangar that they would convert into a museum. The site, at Rancho Vista Boulevard and 30th Street East, would be near where all six of the space shuttles were built and near the city's airpark.

"We have a natural connection," said Mayor Jim Ledford. "We built all the shuttles and we did 20 years of modifications on them."

During a lobbying trip to Washington, city officials met with representatives of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the body that will receive the shuttles once they are retired. During the Jan. 29 meeting, Palmdale officials said they were told the display of an orbiter would require an indoor, climate-controlled building.

"You're talking a full-scale museum," Ledford said. "We have to create a destination that'll draw people from all over the world."

The location being eyed by Palmdale officials, known as Site 9, features two massive hangars that were used to build 100 B-1B bombers during the 1980s and have been used more recently as movie soundstages for the Tom Hanks film "The Terminal" and for the third installment of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.

One of the hangars is being used to house a NASA airborne observatory, but the other could be converted into a climate-controlled building that could hold a shuttle as well as one of the Boeing 747 shuttle carrier aircraft used to ferry the orbiters to Florida.

Smithsonian also suggested that Palmdale look at including the "lifting body" aircraft, wingless, blunt-nosed aircraft flown at Edwards Air Force Base