When a bill in the U.S. Congress is nearly 1,000 pages long, most of the details never get reported to the American taxpayers. After all, they are just footing the bill.
A few members of Congress even accidentally admitted they did not read the entire bill.
Over time… no doubt, over a very long time… more details of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will come to light. One such detail popped up on my computer screen last Friday. Since it has not received much attention, I will share it with you today.
Included in the OBBBA is $85 million to relocate the retired NASA space shutter Discovery. It belongs to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, and is housed in the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar The Udvar-Hazy Center is an annex at Dulles International Airport.
According to https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/orbiter-space-shuttle-ov-103-discovery/nasm_A20120325000, “NASA transferred Discovery to the Smithsonian in April 2012 after a delivery flight over the nation’s capital.” It is “preserved as intact as possible as it last flew in 2011 on the 133rd Space Shuttle mission.
Discovery weighs 161,325 pounds and measures 78 feet by 57 feet by 122 feet. It looks a little worse for the wear in the photographs on the Smithsonian’s Air and Space website, so one has to wonder what moving it would do to it. It flew nearly 150 million miles in its 28 years in service.
U.S. Senator John Cornyn, a Republican representing Texas, wrote the provision in the OBBBA which would relocate Discovery to Houston, Texas. Cornyn maintains that moving the space shuttle to Texas would right “this egregious wrong” because Texas has played such a big part in NASA’s space program.
U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat representing Virginia, stated, “This ridiculous transfer would make Americans pay a $30 fee to view a shuttle that they can see for free right now in Chantilly.”
Kaine questions the message the relocation of the shuttle would send to Americans for them to pay $85 million to move the shuttle halfway across the country while Medicaid and nutrition assistance funding is being slashed by the same piece of legislation.
I agree with Senator Kaine. $85 million would pay a lot of medical bills for low-income Americans.
It seems to me that Texas could be given the next big piece of NASA equipment to be retired.
Until my next blog post
I hope you get to see Discovery for free before it is moved to Texas.
I hope you have a good book to read.
Remember the people of Ukraine, western North Carolina, and the Hill Country of Texas.
Janet
Janet's Writing Blog 