HOUSTON—It was the bitterest of pills for Houston, the home of human spaceflight. This is the city Neil Armstrong hailed, by name, after the lunar module reached the surface of the Moon. And more than that, however, thousands of technicians, engineers, and flight directors had managed the space shuttle program from Houston for three decades. They designed the shuttle, tested it, and operated it. They loved those vehicles and mourned when 14 neighbors lost their lives during two accidents.

And then, in April 2011, the city of astronauts learned the bitter truth. The retiring space shuttles would go to museums in Washington, DC, New York, and Los Angeles plus a visitor’s center at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Houston’s prize? A pair of flown space shuttle seats.

For the city and more specifically Space Center Houston, the official visitor’s center for Johnson Space Center that had made a bid for a shuttle, it was a humbling moment. “We are really disheartened,” the visitor center’s president, Richard Allen, said at the time.

To both the center’s and Allen's credit, they did not give up. Allen would even eat more humble pie. As part of its successful bid to attain space shuttle Atlantis, which it planned to display in a gorgeous new $100 million facility, the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex no longer needed its full-size shuttle replica, “Explorer,” a high-fidelity mock-up installed there in 1993. Would Houston like the replica Florida was getting rid of to make way for the real thing?

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Houston would. After the space center took delivery of Explorer it renamed it “Independence,” and by the spring of 2013 Allen announced a new plan. The mock shuttle would be displayed atop NASA’s original Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a modified Boeing 747 jet, and the entire display would be accessible to the public. After two years of work including refurbishing Independence and the arduous process of moving the carrier aircraft several miles along Houston streets, the $12 million exhibit finally goes on public display this Saturday.

So had Houston, a can-do city, done it? Had it salvaged a worthy exhibit from a morass of disappointment? Senior Space Editor Eric Berger and Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson ventured over Tuesday morning to take a look before the display opens Saturday morning.