Enterprise Gets Ready to Fly One Last Time

Engineers at the American space agency are currently well underway to getting the long-retired space shuttle Enterprise ready for its last flight. The spacecraft, which has been on display since 1985, was the first NASA prototype for the Shuttle Program, and has been on display in a Smithsonian museum ever since. Now, as the institution gets ready to receive one of the three space-worthy orbiters still in circulation, it needs to find a new home for Enterprise. And the best way to move such a piece of equipment is aboard one of the two SCA planes, Space reports.

The Shuttle Carrier Aircrafts (SCA) are two, heavily-modified Boeing 747 jetliners capable of carrying the heavy shuttles on special mounts on their roofs. This is the preferred method of transportation for the orbiters from one part of the country to the other, as delivering them by ground would be a lot more expensive, and take longer. The SCA are generally used when, for example, a shuttle lands at the Edwards Air Force Base (EAFB), in California, rather than their home, the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), in Florida. Such a trip usually costs $2 million, and takes two days to complete.

Enterprise played a crucial part in the development of NASA's space exploration plans, and also in what would later become the International Space Station (ISS). It's safe to say that building the lab would have been impossible if NASA didn't have the knowledge its engineers collected by test flying the shuttle prototype (designation OV-101). In one of the test flights, it was proven for the first time that a massive spacecraft can land like a glider. All the tests that led to the SCA being employed as shuttle carriers were also conducted on Enterprise. Since 2003, the orbiter has been on display in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

“If we indeed receive a flown orbiter as expected, we can't be greedy and have two of them here so we'll need to look for a new home for Enterprise. The people who are starting to work on the logistics for flying the orbiters to their different new homes decided that they better take a good look at Enterprise and just validate that it is ferry-worthy after all these years. The assumption all along is that it is and a quick look assessment had indicated that yes, it is intact. Now that they're getting really serious about the possibility of a ferry flight, they wanted to take a very close look – a microscope look – at the critical features and junctures,” curator Valerie Neal told collectSPACE in an interview.