On Nov 2, 1:30*pm, Damon Hill wrote:

Huh. *They've had Enterprise for years and years! *Mostly hidden
away in a storage hanger.

Open to the public since 2003.

Give Discovery to the aerospace museum in Seattle. *We'll give her a
place of honor.

The people I've talked to here in DC thought Seattle was the most
likely to get an OV of all the non-government museums, but they were
not thrilled with the idea of a non-government museum getting a
orbiter (no decisions seem to have been made). The basic problem is
that they are forever. Once the SCA retires, there will be essentially
no way to move them around, so they need to be at a museum that will
be able to take good care of them 100 years from now (yes, this is the
timeline that NASA and NASM are using). There is simply no guarantee
that Boeing and Microsoft will still be raining dollars on the Museum
of Flight seven decades from now.

Look at the plight of the USS Olympia as an example of what can happen
to private museums saddled with old, expensive to maintain, priceless
artifacts. NASA and NASM have an obligation to try and prevent that,
which is why the general expectation is that public museums are going
to win. And that makes budget issues something of a shell game.
Whether NASM or NASA (at least one SFC is probably going to get one)
or the USAF (NMUSAF is probably going to get one) pays for it, it will
pretty much have to come from Congress, so whomever gets the money to
pay for it, it will be paid for.

Chris Manteuffel