Lacking Buyers, NASA Cuts Prices On Shuttles and Old Engines 131
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."
Put it on eBay! (Score:5, Interesting)
Eternal glory awaits the astronaut farmer (Score:4, Interesting)
Eternal fame and fortune await the first of us to privately assemble, launch, orbit the earth at least once, and return safely.
That's the proof there are no real rich geeks (Score:2, Interesting)
As I'm into house automation and such, I mostly work for filthy rich people. And those people really buy lots of incredibly expensive unuseful crap like hand-made custom choppers to display in their living room (I'm a biker and that pains me), castles as country house, Juan Miró paintings for the crapper and such.
If I was that rich, I'll *ride* the chops and I'll certainly never miss the opportunity of having my own space shuttle on my back yard. Don't you too?
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El Guerrero del Interfaz
Re:More than one Buran out there... (Score:1, Interesting)
A worthy place for Enterprise might be next to the Buran at the http://speyer.technik-museum.de/exhibits/spaceshuttle-buran/sp_610.html [technik-museum.de](Germany). At Sinsheim http://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/node/27 [technik-museum.de], they already have a Russian Tupolev TU-144 and an Air France CONCORDE on display.
Buran flight test article at Technikmuseum Speyer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:More than one Buran out there... (Score:4, Interesting)
In regards to the Enterprise, it was intended to make it into space. The original plan by NASA was to retro-fit the Enterprise to fly into space once the initial landing and approach tests were completed. An older vehicle that was used as a test article was eventually converted into the Challenger, and the Endeavor had a somewhat similar history. Both when the Challenger blew up and the Columbia burned up, the thought of finishing the job to make the Enterprise fully spaceflight worthy had been brought up, but rejected due to the costs involved in such a conversion. That is certainly much closer to going into space than most other vehicles that I can think of.
Clearly the Enterprise did fly on its own as an independent vehicle on at least three different occasions, and did contribute significantly to the development of the Space Shuttle program that we know today. For me, it clearly belongs in any list of shuttles that you could mention, and does count as a prototype by every definition of the word.
Now if you want to quibble over the Pathfinder, that is one you can certainly debate. That is the vehicle which was used to be a full mock-up of the Shuttle that could be used to train technicians assembling the parts of the Shuttle and to check ground clearances for moving the Shuttle around if they just wanted to see if it could fit or not. It certainly seems better to screw up on a cheap hunk of steel that won't ever go into space than to make a mistake on a vehicle that cost over a billion dollars to build in the first place. That hunk of steel was never intended to go into space at any time, and barely looks like a Shuttle.
Vegas (Score:4, Interesting)
This thing really needs to be sitting in the middle of a Las Vegas casino. They could line it with slot machines and run high-stakes card games in the cargo bay.