Officials at the Museum of Flight in Seattle must be pretty cocky. Even though NASA hasn't agreed to sell them one of the retired space shuttles yet, they're about to start building a magnificent glass case to show it off. Will the mothballed Enterprise, Endeavor or Atlantis find a final resting place in this gorgeous, lit-up jewel box case?
Whether it will contain a shuttle or not, the groundbreaking for this $12 million Space Gallery happens next Tuesday, June 29th. The climate-controlled glass building will be brilliantly illuminated at night to dazzle all that pass by with visions of that space truck that went nowhere. if they don't have a shuttle, well, they'll put a bunch of other space artifacts in there. One thing's for sure, they'll have to finish building this structure by 2011 to be considered by NASA for a shuttle.
The $12 million building sounds costly, but that's dwarfed by the $28.8 million price NASA is asking for each of the retired shuttles (well, except for Discovery, already promised to the Smithsonian). That's not too bad of a deal, though, considering that the space shuttle Endeavor cost about $1.7 billion to build.
The lucky buyers will have to plunk down another few million to transport their shuttle to its final destination, making this an expensive undertaking. We're hoping whoever buys them, they'll let us sit in the left seat and pretend to be a shuttle pilot.
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