Why do what is best for the governed when your power lets you do what keeps yourself in power. Isn’t there a word for that kind of government?

Edward: The reason New York and California got shuttles over Texas is because Obama was doing favors to states that vote Democrat. There was no way he was going to give Houston a shuttle.

Had the decision been made on merit and logic, Florida, Texas, and California would have gotten shuttles.

Discovery, the fleet leader and “vehicle of record,” was the focus of Cornyn and Cruz’s original “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act.”

“Home” is an interesting word for them to use. Not only did no Space Shuttle live in Texas, none ever visited it. The same is true for New York, until they stuck one on an aircraft carrier. An aircraft carrier! What an inappropriate place for a Space Shuttle.

New York never deserved a Space Shuttle, and more: the city does not take care of the one they have, damaging it during shipping, putting it under a mere tent, and the tent being so weak that it collapsed onto the Orbiter during a storm.

Taking the Shuttle from the museum in which how many millions of visitors per year see it to a place where how many dozens of people per year would see it does not make sense. This is something so stupid that only Congress could think of doing it. Certainly no rocket scientist would want to take something like this from the Smithsonian — not just a world-class museum but the museum against which all world-class museums are measured.

The California Science Center in Los Angeles is not so far from where the Orbiters were made, so the workers and their friends and families get to go see what they made, parts and pieces that they touched (same for the workers at Kennedy). In addition, the Science Center has an External Tank and plans to mount them together vertically so that visitors can see what they looked like on the pad. There is a unique display of a Space Shuttle. The Science Center has also placed Endeavor inside a strong protective climate controlled building, protecting their Orbiter much better than New York protects theirs.

“There is no better place for one of NASA’s space shuttles to be displayed than Space City,” said [Senator John] Cornyn [(R-Texas)]

Really? No better place? With an attitude like that, what other NASA artifacts is Space City going to demand be taken back from the Smithsonian? Skylab?

“We continue to work on the basis that the shuttle identified is Discovery and proceed with our preparations for its arrival and providing it a world-class home,” Keesha Bullock, interim COO and chief communications and marketing officer at Space Center Houston, said in a statement.

A visitor center that no one has ever heard of is considering itself to be a world-class home? Better than the Smithsonian? Better than the Air and Space museum that beats every other air museum and space museum on the planet? Really? Chutzpah.

One has to wonder: if Houston deserves a Space Shuttle, if there is no better place for one of NASA’s Shuttle Orbiters, then why was Houston snubbed in the first place in favor of an unsuited New York City aircraft carrier? Aircraft carrier. What were they thinking? Once a decade they find a new way to mess up their Orbiter.

So now we are supposed to spend a whole bunch of money moving a Space Shuttle Orbiter so that NASA can spend a whole bunch of other money making a building to house it, and the one they want to take is already in a perfectly good building with caring curators (and curatrixes?), restorers and preservers, and docents, while the one with the haphazard tent on the out-of-place location gets to remain poorly tended. If we must spend a lot of money on this project, then we should rescue the one Orbiter that is facing disaster.

An aircraft carrier. *Sigh*

PS — Lee S Awake or asleep, moving Discovery is still a stupid idea.

I was admittedly very tired when listening to this news analysis, but it struck me as a thinly thought out idea and the finances allocated by folks without a clue.

Don’t shoot me down if I got something wrong.. but ever in my dozing state, I thought ” this seems like a stupid idea”