NASA / Dimitri Gerondidakis
ATLANTIS: Retirement Update #2... For the past two weeks, workers at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Visitor Complex have been clearing up space at KSC’s premiere tourist site to make room for a $100 million museum exhibit that will house the orbiter Atlantis more than a year from now. The first changes to be made were the removal of the two life-size solid rocket booster (SRB) replicas that were displayed outside of the Shuttle Launch Experience facility. A few days later, the external tank, or ET (which was actual flight hardware), was removed from its stand and transported to a temporary storage location near KSC. And last Sunday, the Explorer—a full-scale space shuttle mockup—was towed from the visitor complex to a loading dock near the Banana River where she will stay for the next couple of months. Explorer will then be placed onto a barge and transported down the Gulf Coast to Space Center Houston, Johnson Space Center’s visitor complex, in Texas for permanent display.
Posted directly above and below are pics I took of Explorer, the ET and SRBs at the visitor complex when I went to Kennedy Space Center in February of 2009. Construction on Atlantis’ exhibit will take place early next year.
NASA / Jim Grossman
NASA / Dmitri Gerondidakis
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