On 11/2/2010 2:07 PM, Chris wrote:
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.
The thing is, we only need keep _one_ intact and in good repair for
historical purposes, not all three surviving orbiters and Enterprise.
Note that we didn't keep the first fully streamlined nuclear attack
submarine (SSN-585 Skipjack) or our first Polaris missile sub (SSBN-598
George Washington) fully intact at all, even though they were both very
historically significant; both were scrapped, except for George
Washington's sail.
The British unceremoniously scrapped one of the most historically
significant warships of all time - HMS Dreadnought.
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.
You think that's bad, look what happened to USS Oregon; Oregon gave it
back for service in the US Navy during WWI as a patriotic gesture, and
at the conclusion of the war the Navy said it was theirs to do whatever
they wanted to with it, and instead of returning it to Oregon, scrapped it.
They could save a lot of expense on upkeep of Olympia if they followed
the lead of what the Japanese did with the flagship of the imperial
fleet at the battle of the Tsushima Straits in 1905; they set the
battleship IJN Mikasa in concrete up to the waterline, thereby
eliminating the need to keep her hull watertight:
http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNJA...kasa_1_pic.jpg
Pat