Look up and wave bye
Small space consolation? NASA reschedules to give Houston a space shuttleflyover after all
Maybe Johnson Space Center's existing facilities and artifacts aren't quite up to snuff, but Houstonians were justifiably butthurt about getting snubbed in the distribution of space shuttles.
We are Space City, after all.
Our one consolation was to be a farewell glimpse of the Space Shuttle Endeavour (mounted atop a specially-outfitted Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft) on its voyage to Los Angeles, with low flyovers above Houston, Clear Lake and Galveston before a landing at Ellington Field.
The shuttle will be available for public viewing near the NASA Hangar 990 pedestrian gate at Ellington Wednesday.
The aircraft was initially scheduled to be at Ellington for a good chunk of Monday and all day Tuesday with a picturesque dawn departure on Wednesday, but Florida has been experiencing some nasty weather — bad enough to push back the shuttle's anticipated lift off for three days.
There were rumblings in Houston that the city might not even get a flyover because of the weather's impact on the schedule.
On Tuesday morning, NASA officials decided that the skies will be sufficiently clear by Wednesday to take off from the Kennedy Space Center, and space officials now say that Endeavour and its carrier will hover over the Houston area between 9 and 10:30 a.m. that morning.
The shuttle will be available for public viewing near the NASA Hangar 990 pedestrian gate at Ellington for the rest of Wednesday before heading west around dawn on Thursday.
In its cross-country haul, the shuttle and carrier will also fly low over the Stennis Space Center on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the Michoud Assembly Plant near New Orleans, the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, plus San Francisco, Sacramento and other northern California sites.
After landing at Los Angeles International Airport, the Endeavour will make a two-day, 12-mile trek to its final resting place, the California Science Center.
