People watch from the balcony of a building as the space shuttle Enterprise, riding on the back of the NASA 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, cruises over the Hudson river, Friday, April 27, 2012 in New York. Enterprise is eventually going to make its new home in New York City at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer |
NEW YORK (AP)—Look! Up in the sky! It’s a … space shuttle?
An unusual flying object came to New York from Washington on Friday—the space shuttle Enterprise.
Enterprise
zoomed around the city, riding piggyback on top of a modified jumbo
jet. Its trip included flyovers over parts of the city and landmarks
including the Statue of Liberty and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space
Museum on Manhattan’s west side.
As
the shuttle passed Manhattan, people gathered on rooftops to gawk. It
was chased through the air by a NASA plane, and in the Hudson River by
numerous ferries and other boats.
The shuttle had been scheduled to arrive earlier in the week, but NASA pushed it back because of bad weather.
Onlookers
bundled up in a blustery spring day to await the flyover along the
Hudson River. Crowds gathered along piers, cameras slung around their
necks. The roar of the aircraft could barely be heard over the howling
winds.
The
shuttle prototype was housed at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington but will soon be making its home at the Intrepid, where it
will be “the largest and most significant space artifact in the entire
Northeast,” said Susan Marenoff-Zausner, Intrepid’s president.
That
won’t happen right away; after its fly-around, the Enterprise is
heading to Kennedy Airport, where it will remain for a few weeks until
it’s taken off the 747 jet it rode to New York.
After
that, Marenoff-Zausner said, it will be put on a barge in early June
and brought up the Hudson River to the Intrepid, where it will be put on
the flight deck and a pavilion over it will be completed. The museum
anticipates opening the shuttle exhibit to the public in mid-July.
“When
somebody comes to visit, they will not only see the shuttle itself, but
will have an engaging and interactive experience inside the pavilion,”
she said.
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Enterprise
comes to New York as part of NASA’s process of wrapping up the shuttle
program, which ended last summer. At the Smithsonian, its place has been
taken by the shuttle Discovery. Shuttle Endeavor is going to Los
Angeles and shuttle Atlantis is staying at Florida’s Kennedy Space
Center.
Enterprise
has never been used in an actual space mission, but was a full-scale
test vehicle used for flights in the atmosphere and experiments on the
ground.
That doesn’t make Intrepid any less excited about having it, Marenoff-Zausner said.
“This
is an institution in American history,” she said, adding, “This tested
so many different things that without it, travel into space would never
have happened.”
She
is confident the public will feel the same way and anticipates interest
in the shuttle will increase the number of annual visitors by about
30%, to 1.3 million over the course of a year.
The
public’s interest is what drove the Intrepid to find a way to display
it even though a permanent display location still has to be found,
Marenoff-Zausner said.
The
initial plan was to leave it at the airport for a couple of years until
its permanent home was set, she said, but “we want the public to be
able to experience this immediately.”
In
order to do that, Intrepid had to do some shuffling around of its
collection. Last week, three aircraft were taken off the flight deck and
sent to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum in Glenville, N.Y.
Source: The Associated Press
