The transportation of Endeavour from Florida, where all the orbiters were prepared for their futures as artifacts, to the California Science Center was a monumental challenge. The first step was a cross-country flight atop a NASA Boeing 747. Two specially outfitted airplanes had long been used for transporting orbiters from Edwards Air Force Base in California, where they sometimes landed, to Florida, where they launched. This last journey was in the reverse direction, with stops in Texas, Arizona, and Dryden Flight Research Center (now Armstrong) before a final landing at LAX. On September 19, 2012, the double-decker configuration rolled down the runway at Kennedy Space Station and lifted into the air, circling to bid farewell to all the space workers below who’d overseen the launches of the past.





The more arduous leg of the journey, LAX to the science center—which was dubbed Mission 26—came a few weeks later through the streets of Los Angeles and Inglewood. People of all ages lined the streets to cheer for the spacecraft as it crawled along through the day and night of its final homecoming. Though many trees, poles, and signs along the route had been removed, the orbiter sometimes had inches or less of clearance as the tow driver maneuvered the spacecraft’s wings alongside memorial pine trees on Martin Luther King Boulevard. Endeavour made the journey safely, and Phillips was all smiles to welcome it.

This spring, after a ceremonial title transfer on April 12, the fuel tank for Endeavour—the enormous orange cylinder the shuttle is attached to at takeoff—took a cruise aboard a barge from Louisiana and through the Panama Canal, where Phillips joined it to make sure all was proceeding according to plan, and into harbor in Los Angeles. The tank, almost 154 feet long, made a similar journey through the city’s streets to join the orbiter. Two white rocket boosters like those attached to the shuttle’s fuel tank for launch will eventually be added to the Science Center’s collection as well. The goal for the team at the California Science Center is to put these components together so that Endeavour stands as it did on the launch pad. Phillips says he and the team of designers and fundraisers can make that happen by 2018.

Atlantis, meanwhile, has stayed near its launch home. A year after the shuttle returned to Florida from its final mission, it moved only a few miles to the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex where space shuttle workers themselves can visit the orbiter they maintained over its years of service. Atlantis is displayed with its payload bay doors open—not an easy mechanical feat for doors designed to open and close in zero gravity, but one that allows viewers to imagine the shuttle during a mission in low-Earth orbit.

In fact, once Phillips and his team situate Endeavour to their liking, each exhibit of the three flown-in-space orbiters will demonstrate a different aspect of the space shuttle’s work life. Endeavour will point upright at the California Science Center as if ready for launch. Atlantis is tilted in a bank at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex as if in spaceflight. Discovery is displayed at the National Air and Space Museum as if it has just landed.

Each orbiter is “a star,” said Neal, the Smithsonian curator, “around which the story of 30 years in orbit can be told."