Editorial: Shuttle decision more than a disappointment; it’s an outrage

Dallas Morning News: Editorial: Shuttle decision more than a disappointment; it’s an outrage
Forget that we’re all Texans here and more than a little biased. If you asked unbiased people in Botswana to name the city they most associate with space exploration, chances are they’d say Houston.

When humans landed on the moon in 1969, the very first sentences out of commander Neil Armstrong’s mouth were heard around the world: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” For all of the past 135 shuttle missions, the first and last sentences out of the mission chief’s mouth included some reference to Houston.

It boggles the mind, then, to contemplate the Washington decision-making that, on Tuesday, awarded exhibits of retired shuttle orbiters to New York, Washington, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and a fourth to (drum roll) … Los Angeles.

The announcement came on the 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle flight — a flight that shuttle biographer Henry Dethloff describes as having been conceived in large part during discussions on Oct. 27, 1966, about creation of a reusable launch vehicle. And where did those discussions occur? Houston.

The commander of the first shuttle mission, STS-1, was John Young, who spent nearly all of his career training at the Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. From his current home near Houston, Young can drive to the space center’s museum and look over capsules and all kinds of memorabilia from his early days in the Gemini program and its Mercury predecessor.

Young can tour various gigantic Saturn V rocket components that carried Apollo vehicles like the one he commanded to the moon and back. And he can recall incredible stories of Apollo 13 — the infamous “Houston, we’ve had a problem” flight. Young was part of the Houston team that scrambled to adapt filters, tubes and other odds and ends to extend the crew’s life on the lunar landing module as the Apollo 13 capsule slowly died.

Young and millions of visitors to the Johnson Space Center can tour just about every aspect of the U.S. space program except one big one: the shuttle itself. Like the rest of us, he’ll have to hop on a plane to Florida, Washington, New York or … Los Angeles.

Texans were warned weeks ago that politics would play a role in this decision, even though Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden, the NASA administrator, insists that’s not the case. Bolden, himself a former astronaut, could not possibly have overlooked Houston’s pivotal role in the shuttle program.

This newspaper shares the skepticism of Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who stated, “It is clear political favors trumped common sense and fairness in the selection of the final locations for the orbiter fleet.”

This decision isn’t just a disappointment. It’s an outrage.