Inside space shuttle enterprise8/12/2023 ![]() ![]() And for a certain glory-centric definition of shuttle, that's true. The Enterprise is sometimes dismissed as a lesser museum artifact due to the fact that it is not a "real" shuttle. Still, you might hardly notice given all the excitement of being inside a space shuttle. The inside is mostly stripped aside from structural elements, curator Eric Boehm told us, which gives it a surprisingly cavernous feel for a shuttle that is normally crammed with stuff. The Intrepid's summer volunteers get a single tour of the interior as a perk. Visitors aren't allowed anywhere inside the shuttle, which is closed to everyone except select staff and employees responsible for maintaining and restoring it (plus the occasional visiting astronaut dignitary). The Enterprise also bears some scars from its last move, when a worker rapped on some of the tiles on the port-side landing gear door and cracked them. When they tried shooting the same foam at Enterprise's stronger fiberglass tiles and the tiles still took damage, they knew they were on the right track. At the time, investigators suspected that the breakup started when a piece of foam separated from Columbia's external tank and struck its delicate (and expensive) leading-edge carbon-carbon tiles. Up close, visitors can see the leading edge where NASA borrowed tiles from the Enterprise to figure out why Columbia broke apart on re-entry in 2003. Its first flight took place on February 18, 1977, mated with a modified Boeing 747 called the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, and NASA tried releasing the shuttle to study its fall for the first time on August 12.įurther Reading The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia The Enterprise was never outfitted for space because it was used mostly in approach and landing tests to see how a shuttle would fall back to the ground (the last two flights without a tail cone) as well as launch pad testing. It uses fiberglass tiles on the leading-edge panels where the shuttle gets the hottest on re-entry instead of the reinforced carbon-carbon required to withstand 2,300✯ temperatures. The Enterprise's skin is more like that of a plane, with polyurethane foam tiles to simulate the surface of actual shuttles. Eventually, NASA figured out that the best dorsal surface material for shuttles entering and leaving space was a variety of blankets, some made from Nomex felt and others from quilted surface material. ![]() The shuttle's skin is also not space-ready. But since the Enterprise has always been Earth-bound, it has nothing but covered holes. A shuttle should be speckled with reaction control system thrusters to help maintain or change its orientation in space. Where a shuttle's $40 million engines should be, the Enterprise has mere mockups, covered by a cone for aerodynamic purposes. Like the USS Enterprise it's named after, the Enterprise shuttle is more or less fake. ![]()
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