"Keep One Here" Campaign Kicks Off

"Keep One Here."

That's the rallying cry of a grass-roots group that began a bid Thursday to make certain either Atlantis, Discovery or Endeavour roosts in retirement at Kennedy Space Center.

NASA now is under direction to shut down its shuttle fleet by September 2010, and museums around the country are aiming to display one of the agency's three winged spaceships.

The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., likely will have first dibs. The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, is expected to compete.

So is the The Museum of Flight in Seattle and perhaps NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and Marshall Space Flight Center in Hunstville, Ala., not to mention the city of Palmdale, Calif., where the orbiters were built.

"It's clear that everyone thinks it would be an absolute sin if we did not have a space shuttle here for display," said Jim Banke, an aerospace-industry veteran from Melbourne, who is organizing the local effort. "And we absolutely cannot take for granted that we are going to get one. We can't just assume that one of them is automatically ours."

NASA in December put out a notice to gauge interest from educational institutions and science museums. The agency said it would cost organizations an estimated $42 million to ready an orbiter for display.

NASA said it would cost $28.2 million to "safe" a spaceship -- to deservice an orbiter and remove toxic propellants. Another $8 million would be required to prepare a ship for display. And it would cost another $5.8 million to ferry an orbiter to its retirement home.

Former KSC Directors Jay Honeycutt, Jim Kennedy and Bob Crippen -- the latter a former astronaut who piloted Columbia on its maiden voyage in 1981 -- all are involved in the bid to bring one of the birds to a final roost here at KSC.

NASA officials at KSC will submit a proposal by March 17, and the grass-roots advisory group will meet again in mid-February to form a publicity campaign.

The idea is to display an orbiter at the KSC Visitor Complex, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Florida.

"We think that we've got a nice place to display the shuttle, and to tell the story of the shuttle program," said Lisa Malone, director of external relations at KSC. "It's an important story to tell, and it makes sense to have one of the orbiters at the launch site."

ABOUT THE IMAGE: Click to enlarge the Florida Today image of shuttle Endeavour being rolled from an Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building in advance of the launch last March of the STS-123 mission to deliver the first of three Japanese segments to the International Space Station. Photo credit: Michael R. Brown/Florida Today.