Lacking Buyers, NASA Cuts Prices On Shuttles and Old Engines

Hugh Pickens writes "Russia's Space Shuttle, Buran, ended its days at a theme park in Moscow and was once offered for sale on the Internet for 3 million dollars. Now the NY Times reports that when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration put out the call in December 2008 seeking buyers for US shuttles from museums, schools and elsewhere, the agency didn't get as much interest as expected, so now NASA has slashed the price of the 1970s-era spaceships, available for sale this fall once their flying days are over, from $42 million to just $28.8 million apiece. 'We're confident that we'll get other takers,' says agency spokesman Mike Curie. The Discovery is already promised to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum but the Atlantis and the Endeavour are still up for grabs and it is possible that the Enterprise, a shuttle prototype that never made it to space, will also be available. The lower price is based on NASA's estimate of the cost for transporting a shuttle from Kennedy Space Center to a major airport, and for displaying it indoors in a climate-controlled building. As for the space shuttle main engines, those are now free. NASA advertised them in December 2008 for $400,000 to $800,000 each, but no one expressed interest. So now the engines are available, along with other shuttle artifacts, for the cost of transportation and handling."

Perfect geek storm!

[houstonbofh]

One free shuttle engine.
One old impala.
Mythbusters
Best Show EVER!

Sell it to Bill Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

And put himself and Balmer in it... Wait lets throw in a few PETA people also.. oh and Leo Laporte -- just because...point it at the moon and just go away.. Oh dam was I dreaming again?

Re:More than one Buran out there...

[MMC Monster]

Free Shuttle parts for the cost of transport?! Please, will somebody in the know confirm you don't have to be some large educational institution or venerable museum? ;)

Or Bond villain.

How about a piece of Columbia?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take two.

Re:More than one Buran out there...

[Colonel Korn]

PS. Free Shuttle parts for the cost of transport?! Please, will somebody in the know confirm you don't have to be some large educational institution or venerable museum? ;)

Confirmed. And if you have Amazon Prime, it's free 2-day shipping.

Re:all in the marketing

[DamonHD]

Paint them black and Ming won't be doing many re-entries per shuttle... %-P

Rgds

Damon

Re:first bid!

[wraithguard01]

But look at the shipping and handling costs. That's what gets ya everytime. $1 space shuttle engine, $28.8 million shipping and handling. It's a rip off.

MythBusters

[MillionthMonkey]

NARRATOR: Unfortunately, while it may be easy to purchase a used surplus NASA space engine, some of the logistics aren't turning out to be easy to handle!

Adam Savage: [Jamie's stupid toy space suit in background] When we bought this thing, we figured, great! Now we don't need to build our own engine. Unfortunately, it seems that the engines are actually too big to transport on any truck we've been able to find. So that's going to be a problem, but we'll handle it.

[Cut to scene of Jamie Hyneman wearing a welder's face helmet and blasting through sheet metal emblazoned "NASA" in those funny letters]

NARRATOR: So while the rest of the guys are getting the lot ready for the explosion, Jamie is busy disassembling the engine into parts!

Jamie Hyneman: [Lifts up welder's mask] This is turning out to be a lot of work, but if we're going to test this myth, we've got to get our water recycling machine up into space, bwwwwssssh [makes vertical "blast-off" gestures] and we'll be drinking our own pee and sweat in no time!