While it’s still over three and a half years before the shuttle fleet makes its final flight, a scramble already seems to be developing among locations that want to be home to the three remaining orbiters once retired. California Assemblywoman Sharon Runner (R-Lancaster) announced this week that she has introduced a joint resolution in the state legislature that would ask NASA to retire the shuttle Atlantis in Palmdale, where the orbiter fleet was assembled. The resolution, AJR 52, was actually introduced late last month, and claims that, among other things, sending Atlantis to Palmdale would “free an OPF (Orbiter Processing Facility) for NASA’s Exploration Mission Directorate, provide for a dedicated and focused workforce within ground operations at KSC to maintain and process Discovery and Endeavour to fly out the remainder of the Space Shuttle Program safely, and help to stabilize the small Space Shuttle workforce in Palmdale to be able to provide optimal preplanned as well as emergent support to the program through fly-out and termination.”
Why Atlantis? There have been suggestions that Atlantis could be retired as early as 2008, rather than go into an extended maintenance period that might not end before 2010. However, as Robert Pearlman notes on collectSPACE, the legislation “would appear to neglect existing requirements for how NASA must dispose of artifacts and its agreement for the transfer of artifacts to the Smithsonian.” Not that such issues would stop a politician from proposing a resolution like this…
