As the space shuttles get ready for their second lives as museum pieces, NASA officials are already sorting through their storage closets, trying to figure out what to do with all the memorabilia that isn't useful anymore.

"It's like if you have to move out of your apartment pretty quickly," said Bob Sherouse of NASA headquarters, who is handling the distribution of shuttle-related stuff. "You have a number of items that you take with you to your new house, but you rediscover items that you had under your bed or in your closet."

The shuttles themselves will go through a lengthy clean-up process before they're ready for their public debuts. When a shuttle lands, it's covered in hazards: liquid hydrogen and oxygen for fuel, ammonia for coolant, live pyrotechnics for blowing off emergency escape windows.

"We have to remove those chemical hazards so that when it's in a museum, the public can walk up to it without risk of things outgassing or dripping," said NASA flow director Stephanie Stilson, who oversaw all the post-flight checkups and pre-flight preparations for Discovery's last 11 trips to space and is now getting them ready for retirement.

Another piece that will be removed for safety is the Forward Reaction Control System, whose small engines control the shuttle's rotation. The shuttles' noses will be removed, stripped of all their innards, and put back on again.

"From the outside you won't be able to tell that anything was done, but inside will be empty," Stilson said.

Some parts, including windows and movable parts on the wing, will be removed and tested to see how they held up in the harsh environment of space.

"This is the only reusable spacecraft we have. Seeing how it fared in exposure to the space environment is important to us," said Kevin Templin of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, who is in charge of transitioning the shuttles to retirement. "There are certain parts on here that if we didn't have to remove them, we didn't remove them. We now have that chance."

At least one of the displayed shuttles will be missing a manipulator arm which was built by the Canadian Space Agency and will return to Canada. All three shuttles will arrive at their new homes without their main engines. The 14 original engines – three each for Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour, plus five spares – will be set aside to be reused in future spaceflight vehicles. The museums will get replicas built from spare parts.

"It does have real flight hardware on it," Stilson said. "What's not there are the guts."

Aside from that, "we're trying to keep them as flightlike as possible," Stilson said. "Right now the plan would be to show them as if they had just returned from flight." That means no new paint jobs, although if a heat shield tile falls off, the agency will probably replace it with a replica.

But if you want a tile for your own museum or school, you only have to ask. NASA set up a website in October 2009 to clear out their garage. They've screened 24,000 items, promised about 3,000 to schools and museums around the country, and given away about 700. They only charge shipping and handling, which for a tile is $23.40.

"The items range from as small as freezedried food packets to objects as large as a simulator," Sherouse said. "There's a lot more available than there are people asking for it."

What happens when purloined shuttle artifacts (or clever fakes) start going up on eBay? That's already happened, Sherouse says. The demo shuttle Enterprise was up on eBay for a few days recently, until NASA headquarters had them take it down. A Mercury-era space suit, pilfered by a dumpster-diving former employee and kept in a garage for decades, also went up for sale recently.

NASA doesn't take such things lightly, Sherouse says. "When we see that happen, we do take action," he said. Among other issues, it's illegal to send a lot of shuttle artifacts out of the country for national security reasons. The responsibility for keeping engineering secrets safe will transfer to the museums when the shuttles retire.

"It's the government's responsibility now, but it will transfer with the hardware," Templin said. "They will get a letter saying, 'You are still responsible for making sure this doesn't fall into the wrong hands.'"

For now, though, it's almost just like another day at the office for the crew taking Discovery through its final stages. The end of the shuttle era hasn't set in yet for Stilson.

"I really think where it will hit me, and become real for me that this is all coming to an end, will be when we take Discovery to the Smithsonian and leave her there," she said. "I'm hoping all three of the display sites will do a good job of conveying not just the technical savvy of these display crafts, but also the heart and soul of the team that took care of them."

Image: Dane Penland, National Air and Space Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution

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