Wrapping the Enterprise

Patrick McGeehan has an article in The New York Times about plans for the Enterprise:

When New York City made its pitch for one of NASA’s decommissioned space shuttles, one of its selling points was location: a glistening berth on the Hudson River, alongside the aircraft carrier that is home to the Intrepid and the Sea, Air, and Space Museum.
But, five months after the Intrepid was awarded the shuttle Enterprise, museum officials have turned their attention from the end of the newly revamped pier to a parking lot on Twelfth Avenue, across the cacophonous West Side Highway. They envision converting the lot, which is surrounded by H&H Bagels, a car wash, storage warehouses, and a strip club, into a space-themed museum that would serve as the home of the Enterprise and draw as many as one million visitors a year.
Aesthetics aside, the plan has several obstacles to clear. One problem is that the Intrepid does not own the parking lot; the New York State Department of Transportation does. Another is that the property, in Hell’s Kitchen, is zoned for manufacturing, not a museum. And perhaps the biggest hurdle is the many millions of dollars that would have to be raised to build this new home for the Enterprise, which was a prototype for the space shuttles, but never flew in space.
The tentative state of the plan highlights how much less certain the Intrepid’s proposal was than those of some other museums that lobbied for one of the shuttles. The Museum of Flight in Seattle, for example, spent eleven million dollars to build a structure that would house a shuttle, but did not get one.
Houston, home of the Johnson Space Center, was also shut out, in a decision that enraged elected officials in Texas. Representative Ted Poe, a Republican, said the Intrepid’s preference for a different location for the Enterprise might be cause to revisit NASA’s selection process.
“As far as I’m concerned, it won’t be final until it’s sitting up there on the Hudson River where it’s supposed to finally be,” he said in an interview.
A NASA spokesman, Michael Curie, said agency officials were aware of the changes in the Intrepid’s plans and did not “foresee any issues that would prevent transferring Enterprise to Intrepid in 2012”.
The museum’s president, Susan Marenoff-Zausner, said in an interview that she envisioned a museum “with the shuttle as the primary tenant”, but also with classrooms and laboratories for teaching schoolchildren and others about science and technology. “It would be a museum on that side of the highway, which we think could be a linchpin in beautifying the area,” she said.
Marenoff-Zausner said she had discussed the idea with NASA officials, but had not yet made formal requests for financial help from the state or city governments. She said it was too soon to say just how big the museum would be, how it would look, or what it would cost. But she suggested that the shuttle would be visible from outside the building and could “get more exposure on the highway” than on the pier that serves as the entryway to the floating museum.
When officials of the Intrepid museum first broached the idea of bidding for one of the shuttles, they said a transparent building would be constructed for it at the end of the pier. It was to replace a Concorde supersonic jet that has stood on Pier 86 since the pier was rebuilt three years ago.
The Concorde, on long-term loan from British Airways, is part of the Intrepid’s eclectic collection of aircraft and military memorabilia. The ship that houses the museum played a minor role in the space program, picking up astronauts after they splashed down upon returning from space. The museum’s executives used that connection in their bid for one of the decommissioned shuttles.
As NASA was winding down the shuttle program, it offered its three remaining orbiters to museums. After fielding more than twenty responses, NASA awarded the shuttle Atlantis to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Endeavour to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The third, Discovery, was awarded to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. There, it will replace the Enterprise, making the prototype available to the Intrepid.
Of all the choices NASA made, the selection of the Intrepid drew the most complaints, as critics scoffed at New York’s tenuous ties to the space program. Poe has renewed his objection, saying, “That’s like putting the Statue of Liberty in Omaha.”
But Marenoff-Zausner countered that the Intrepid’s annex would be “the only representation of NASA in the entire Northeast corridor.” She said that building a full museum would not necessarily change the schedule previously laid out by NASA.
In a report last month that concluded a review of the shuttle awards, NASA’s inspector general said the Enterprise would be moved from the Smithsonian to Kennedy International Airport in April of 2012. It would be stored in a “climate-controlled tent” inside a hangar at the airport for about two years, then ferried on a barge to the Intrepid.
Marenoff-Zausner was not prepared to say when the museum would be ready for the arrival of the Enterprise, or how it would be moved from a barge on the river and across the West Side Highway. She said the museum was preparing for fund-raising and would seek to change the zoning on the site to allow the museum. The site is part of an industrial section that was rezoned in June.
But the first order of business is to strike a deal with the owner of the parking lot, the Department of Transportation. Intrepid officials met in late July with the state commissioner of transportation, Joan McDonald, to propose the plan. The commissioner has not yet decided if the state is willing to turn over the land, a spokesman for the department said.

Rico says he might have to arrange a trip to New York, if the Enterprise ever gets there. (But a strip club? That'll do well with the few hundred thousand men who come to see the shuttle annually...)