![D’oh! Facepalm](/design_picker/fa16d26efb42e6ba1052f1d387470f643c5aa18d/graphics/icons/comment/facepalm_48.png)
Smashed a wingtip
Did you see where they smashed a wingtip against some pilings under a bridge? That's some typical American competence right there...
http://www.space.com/15996-space-shuttle-enterprise-barge-damage.html
Crowds of locals and tourists turned out yesterday to see space shuttle Enterprise come to her final rest at her floating museum home. Space shuttle Enterprise lands on the Intrepid museum Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls After a day's weather delay, the shuttle set out from New Jersey port on a barge, passing the Statue of …
My thought , as I watched the unspace nonshuttle's wing being smashed was "blimey - all that fuss and they couldn't run to TWO barges lashed gunwale-to-gunwale to properly protect this historic treasure from teh stoopids"?
Wings poking over the sides of the barge. There's no way that could have been foreseen to be a potential f*ckup in the making.
Never mind. Once fixed the wing will just be that much more phoney. Or maybe they could call Grumman for a new one - the plant where they were made is only a few miles away. After all, it's not like any part of this machine ever went anywhere near space.
It's marvelous that the place where they made the only part of the shuttle that wasn't judged to be flawed in some way after the Challenger incident can't get an actual, been-there-and-back space shuttle.
Yes I'm grumpy about it all. If I'm gonna pay for the bloody thing to be shifted about the Hudson river I want it done properly and I want a real shuttle with scorch marks on it and a real rocket engine in the back when they charge me a couple of limbs to look up close at it.
Grumblegrumblegrumble
What's with everybody calling it a Space Shuttle, all of a sudden? IIRC, it was properly named "The Enterprise Test Vehicle".
Incidentally, I saw it at the National Air and Space Museum, a few years back. It's a pretty awesome place - as well as a Concord, they had an SR-71 Blackbird and even the actual Enola Gay (which, at the time, was suspended by wires above a bunch of Japanese planes of that era).
Does anyone else find it ironic that it is now residing in the city that pretty much killed NASA, and is really the antithesis of everything NASA stood for?
You have Wall ST, which killed the economy, and rather than funding going to NASA it bails out rich pricks in suits.
The engineering spirit that drove NASA is totally absent in New York. NY is a sieve that separates money from people. NY doesn't actually produce anything except rich assholes.
The shuttle is more a trophy. a head mounted on a pike as a warning to others.
Around 1982. I was 10 and walking through town (Stockport) with a friend, who pointed up and said "Is that the space shuttle?". Sure enough it was (I later found out) the Enterprise strapped to the back of a Boeing 747 flying quite low. No-one ever believed us we saw the space shuttle flying overhead (including the man across the street we shouted at -- he refused to look up), but in more recent years I managed to track down that it had been at the Paris airshow, and had scheduled a fly-past at Manchester Airport. Still no-one believes me!