This morning I joined a large and enthusiastic crowd on the High Line, an elevated park on Manhattan's West Side, to welcome the Space Shuttle Enterprise to its new home in New York City.
We were among numerous groups who had gathered around the city and along the New Jersey and Westchester Country waterfronts to witness this spectacle. We watched as Enterprise was flown atop a NASA jet up the Hudson River at an altitude of only about 1,500 feet, and a half hour later returned, flying down the river—a heartwarming sight on an otherwise raw and windy day.
The Shuttle left Washington, D.C. about an hour earlier. It had passed the Statue of Liberty and then flew past the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, where it will be housed, in its trek along the Hudson before making a loop across through New Jersey and Queens and across Manhattan en route to a perfect landing in Kennedy airport at 11:23 a.m.
From Kennedy, the Enterprise will be transported by barge to its new home at the Intrepid Museum at the USS Intrepid, a World War II-era aircraft carrier docked at West 46th Street. Within a few months it will be put on display in a temporary, inflatable structure on Intrepid's deck until a separate, nearby building is constructed for it.
When the Shuttle program ended, new homes were chosen for the Enterprise, which had been built as a test model, as well as the three remaining spaceworthy Shuttles: the Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center's Visitor Center; the Endeavour, at the California Science Center in Los Angeles; and the Discovery, at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Last Wednesday, the Space Shuttle Discovery was flown from the Kennedy Space Center to Virginia to replace the Enterprise, which had been on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center. In turn, the Enterprise was to be flown to New York. It was affixed to one of NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), a modified Boeing 747, and after postponements due to weather, it was finally cleared for takeoff today.
The Enterprise was the first Shuttle built, but as a prototype lacking heat shields or engines, it was never intended to fly in space. Commissioned in 1976, the Enterprise was originally to be named the Constitution, but after Star Trek fans petitioned then-President Gerald Ford, the name was changed to Enterprise. It was used for atmospheric testing between 1977 and 1979, piggy-backed aboard an SCA, and on five flights released to glide in for a landing under astronaut control.
For more from today's flyover, see the slideshow above.
