In a move that has at least one Texas congressman crying "bait and switch," New York officials are now considering a new location for the space shuttle test vehicle Enterprise rather than a site near the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum.
One of the selling points that got New York a space shuttle rather than Houston was the promise that it would be displayed in a structure on a pier near the docked aircraft carrier. However New York proposes that it be displayed at a new museum to be built at a parking lot on 12th Avenue, across the West Side Highway. Currently the parking lot is surrounded by a bagel factory, a car wash, warehouses, and a strip club.
Rep, Ted Poe, a Republican from Houston, Texas suggests that this sudden change merits a revisit of the decision to display a space shuttle in New York rather than Houston. The parking lot, located in the unappealing section of New York known as Hell's Kitchen, is owned by New York State's Department of Transportation. The area is zoned for manufacturing, not museums. And building a new museum in this location would cost many millions of dollars.
Houston had a spot reserved for a space shuttle at Space Center Houston, a space museum and interactive center located next to the Johnson Space flight Center where the space shuttle missions were controlled and where the astronauts lived and trained. Houston's argument is that the law mandated that space shuttles be located in areas historically related to the program. The argument for displaying it in New York instead was that it was a better location for tourists. Many people in Houston suspect that the real reason was political. Texas is not one of the president's favorite states of the union. A NASA Inspector General report did not find any untoward political influence in the decision, however, though that has not impressed Texas lawmakers such as Poe.
While the betting is that the ownership and zoning problems will be managed, the question of building a new museum in New York comes down to money. If New York runs into difficulty raising money for the new museum, a good bet considering the current economic malaise, time may pass enough for a new administration to revisit the decision to snub Houston in favor of New York for displaying a space shuttle. One can just imagine what the opinion of-say-a President Rick Perry would be on the subject.
In the meantime, the space shuttle imbroglio remains a running sore in Houston, a city firmly connected with the space program, and concerned that current administration policies are crippling that effort to the detriment of the community whose name was the first word spoken from the surface of the moon.
Texas resident Mark Whittington writes about state issues for the Yahoo! Contributor Network
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