[NYguy]

http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/...ttle-discover/

NYC shouldn’t have won a space shuttle (Discover)



A depiction of the New York Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum's proposed space shuttle orbiter gallery

Aubrey Cohen

...Sure, New York is the biggest city in the country. But the shuttle Discovery was already slated to go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which is just four hours away, in Washington, D.C. And New York’s Intrepid Sea Air & Space Museum, which will get the atmospheric test shuttle Enterprise, is not widely respected.

Take Phil Plait, the astronomer who writes Discovery’s Bad Astronomy blog.

“(T)he Intrepid museum in NYC is a bit of a head-scratcher,” he wrote Wednesday. “(W)hile the museum does get a lot of visitors, I’m wondering why the Johnson Space Center in Houston didn’t get an Orbiter. That seems like a more natural choice, especially given that three of the Orbiters wound up on the east coast.”

People generally seem more accepting of the choices of Florida’s Kennedy Space Center as the home for Atlantis and the California Science Center, in Los Angeles, for Endeavour.

The fact that Intrepid is getting the shuttle that didn’t fly in space would seem an indication that it was the lowest-ranking of the winners. But it still beat out all the other candidates, including every non-coastal site.

Many comments on Plait’s post mirrored his take, but in stronger words, including: “NYC makes no sense,” “it’s a travesty” and “the middle of the country got hosed.”

But New York also had its defenders, with comments such as: “the top tourist destination in the US is New York for both foreign and domestic tourists,” “far more people will see the shuttle in New York, and that’s really the point of sending them to museums” and “More people will see the Enterprise in a year in NYC than in a decade if it were sitting in Houston.”