Barring weather delays, the space shuttle Endeavor will undergo its final, historic lift starting Monday evening, a maneuver no other retired orbiter has undergone.
Plans for the upcoming move – installing the crown jewel of the new Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center – have been in the making for more than a decade. First, a pair of cranes will hoist the shuttle from a horizontal to a vertical position; the spacecraft will be attached to a sling, a large metal frame that will support it during the move. An 11-storey crane will lift the tail of the Endeavor, while a 40-storey crawler crane – about the height of City Hall – will lift the nose.
Once the shuttle is aimed at the stars, the shorter crane is disconnected, allowing the larger crane to gently swing the orbiter into its final position and lower it to be attached to the giant orange external tank. The external tank is attached to two solid rocket boosters, which are connected to the exhibit’s foundation.
Once completed – and the rest of the museum will be built in the coming years – LA will be home to the only retired space shuttle, which will be displayed in a full-stack display as if ready for launch.
The move will consist of two parts. The first – the so-called ‘soft mate’ – starts on Monday around 10 p.m. and can last for hours.
“That’s the part of lifting it into the building and getting it close to the orbiter,” said Jeffrey Rudolph, president of the California Science Center.
The second part will be to “capture” Endeavor in the external tank.
“It’s extremely sensitive to get it in exactly the right position,” Rudolph said. “It puts all the attached hardware in the right place on the orbiter. And several parts in the orbiter that it’s attached to are very fragile, so they’ll do this very slowly.”
Once that’s done, everything still needs to be tightened up, Rudolph said, but the move will essentially be complete. It is believed that by Thursday everything will be ‘hard coupled’, meaning everything will be bolted down as it will be forever. And the crank will come loose, and we’ll say, ‘Done,'” he said.
The schedule may change due to weather, as strong winds would force a postponement of the move.
Read more: Space shuttle Endeavor makes another journey to its final destination at a new space center
After that, nothing should change until the museum opens the cargo bay doors in a few years and the Endeavor is ready for public display, Rudolph said.
There are different challenges in hoisting the shuttle compared to the external tank, which was completed earlier this month. The tank is so large that when it was lowered, there was less than an inch of space between the tank and the solid rocket boosters.
With the Endeavor orbiter — the last space shuttle ever built — crews will have to maneuver an object with a 75-foot wingspan and “get everything absolutely level and properly aligned, and extremely carefully,” Rudolph said.
“There are a few places where lowering is tricky because of the tight fit with the wings and the vertical stabilizer,” he said. “And then the challenge is actually bringing the orbiter – ‘capturing’ – to the three mounting points.”
Because the Endeavor is essentially a glider with a huge wingspan, it will be difficult to guide it down in high winds.
“Wind and wings don’t go well with a crane,” Rudolph said.
“It’s never been done like this before, with cranes and outside and on a construction site,” he said.
When the shuttle, with its external tank and solid rocket boosters, was stacked at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, assembly took place in NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building – one of the largest in the world by volume, standing more than 50 stories high and equipped with sufficient facilities. of cranes and platforms from which work can be done.
Read more: Mission accomplished: Space Shuttle Endeavor’s giant orange fuel tank has been driven to a lookout point in LA
In Los Angeles, crews have had to laboriously build, tear down and reformat scaffolding to make the right connections.
There have also been last-minute changes. During the external tank’s arrival, there were times when the crew “had to run up and remove some scaffolding pieces and reconfigure them while we were in the process of lowering them,” Rudolph said.
The orbiter’s main elevator will likely take one night. The external tank lift, on the other hand, took two nights. The first was delayed by the wind, although crews were able to begin the lift before stopping work mid-morning. On the second night the tank could be lowered further, between the solid rocket boosters.
Officials hope to livestream the final lift. A livestream for the external tank liftoff was scrapped due to technical issues, and officials are working to resolve those issues ahead of Monday’s orbiter move.
Read more: A successful launch: Space Shuttle Endeavor’s rockets have been installed
A veteran of 25 space missions from 1992 to 2011, Endeavor made its last flight in 2012, ending a cross-country journey at Los Angeles International Airport before completing a three-day trek through the city streets to California Science Center undertook. For eleven years, Endeavor was displayed in a temporary hangar, the Samuel Oschin Pavilion, while the museum worked on a permanent home. Endeavor was removed from display on December 31.
The full-stack configuration is so tall that the new museum will rise twenty stories to make room for it.
To keep the view unobstructed, the building was designed without vertical supports, except for the walls. It will have a diagonal grid, developed by engineering firm Arup and covered by a stainless steel facade. Such “diagrids” have been used in other tall buildings, including the 46-story Hearst Tower in New York City, the iconic 40-story oval Gherkin skyscraper in London, and part of London’s egg-shaped City Hall.
Once the shuttle full stack is in place, the rest of the museum will be built around it. It may be a few years before it is open to the public, given the construction schedule and the additional time required to install exhibits.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.