NASA's retired shuttle Endeavour heads to Houston on Monday

Space shuttle Endeavour enters the mate/demate structure at the Kennedy Space Center landing facility where it will be mounted on a modified jumbo jet, Friday, Sept. 14, 2012, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. On Monday morning, Endeavour will make a four-day trip to Los Angeles atop the jumbo jet bound for the California Science Center.(AP Photo/John Raoux)

  CAPE CANAVERAL, FL -- The baby of NASA's space shuttle fleet is about to leave home -- for good.

At sunrise Monday, Endeavour will depart Kennedy Space Center for a museum in California, with a two-day stopover in Houston, home to Mission Control and the astronauts who flew aboard the replacement for the lost shuttle Challenger.

Endeavour is the second of NASA's three retired shuttles to head to a museum. The youngest shuttle will make the four-day trip to Los Angeles atop a modified jumbo jet, bound for the California Science Center. Discovery landed at the Smithsonian Institution's display hangar in Virginia last spring. Atlantis will remain at Kennedy.

After taking off from the former shuttle landing strip Monday morning, Endeavour and its carrier jet will fly low over Kennedy and the beaches of Cape Canaveral, then head west toward NASA points along the Gulf of Mexico. The pair will swoop over Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where the shuttle booster rockets were made.

Next stop: Ellington Field near NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Endeavour will remain at Ellington until Wednesday morning so space center employees can see the shuttle up close. Houston had bid for a shuttle; the loss still nags many there. NASA chose New York City as the winner for the shuttle prototype Enterprise, which was relinquished by the Smithsonian to make room for Discovery.

NASA's two other shuttles during the 30-year program, Challenger and Columbia, were destroyed during flight, with 14 astronauts altogether killed.

Endeavour was built to replace Challenger and made its flying debut in 1992, six years after the launch accident. It performed the next-to-last shuttle mission in May and June 2011.

During its 25 missions, Endeavour logged 299 days in space and circled Earth 4,671 times. Total off-the-planet mileage: 122.8 million miles.

After leaving Houston on Wednesday, Endeavour will stop for fuel at Biggs Army Airfield in El Paso, Texas, and then perform a low flyover of the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, which served for decades as an emergency shuttle landing site. Then it will head to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California, another old shuttle touchdown venue.

On Thursday, Endeavour will fly to Northern California, home to Ames Research Center in Mountain View. NASA plans low-level flights over San Francisco, Sacramento and other major cities before heading to Los Angeles and a late-morning arrival at Los Angeles International Airport.

NASA was mum Thursday regarding the exact times of all these flyovers for security reasons. Officials warned that the weather needed to cooperate to allow for such a full and busy schedule.

The shuttle will make its final 12-mile journey from the airport to the California Science Center, via city streets, on Oct. 12-13. It will go on public display beginning Oct. 30.

Atlantis' road trip -- from a Kennedy Space Center hangar to the visitor complex -- is scheduled for Nov. 2.

NASA retired the shuttle fleet last year under White House direction in order to focus more time and money on travel beyond Earth's orbit, first an asteroid and then Mars in the coming decades.

Private companies, meanwhile, are trying to pick up where NASA left off regarding the International Space Station. Until those businesses can provide spaceships for flying people, U.S. astronauts will need to rely on Russian rockets to get to the orbiting lab.

(Copyright ©2012 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) Get more Technology News »

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Deadline to apply for NASA's next astronaut is today

HOUSTON (KTRK) -- NASA is looking for a dozen dreamers -- Americans willing to sign up for space missions the country hasn't planned yet.

At 10pm Friday, the application deadline closes for the new astronaut class.

Winning a spot in this new astronaut class is a little like getting a great sports car but not having money to buy gas. While NASA says this group of astronauts will work on getting towards Mars, that's a check Congress hasn't written yet.

Nonetheless, a huge group of people are competing for that chance. More than 5,000 applicants are vying for just 12 spots, but at hundreds of thousands of dollars per astronaut just in training, why do it now?

For so many of us, the landing of the shuttle seemed like the end. The last American ride to space had been flown. America's space dream, if not over, certainly looked like it was ending.

But Ben Longmier, a real life rocket scientist, is one of more than 5,000 Americans still willing to dream. He's part of the second largest group ever to apply to become a new NASA astronaut.

"Of course I would love to go to farther into deep space. I would like that very much but it really would be enough to go and do research on the space station. That would be ideal for me," Longmier said.

"I assume it means that they believe we're going to fly in space, which we are," Duane Ross said.

Ross is a believer. He should be. He manages the application process. Peggy Whitson is NASA's chief astronaut.

"We do need astronauts to be selected in 2013, so that I will have them ready for assignment in 2015," Whitson said.

It may seem like a waste of time, money and talent to hire a dozen more space fliers. But NASA's always been optimistic and patient, and it takes years to turn a rocket scientist in to an astronaut.

"We're picking people for now. We're picking them for a requirement that we can't exactly predict five to seven years downstream. One bad thing you can do is not have enough people to go get on the spaceship and we want to make sure that we don't get in that position," Ross said.

The new class won't be picked until next spring. Any one applicant's chance is less than one quarter of one percent.

"People say that it's easier to be a pro athlete than an astronaut and statistically that's right, the numbers work out that way," Longmier said.

Ross admits to thinking more than once that he's picked America's last astronauts and then NASA asks him to pick more.

"Are you a dream maker?" we asked Ross.

"Yeah, I guess. Unfortunately, I am more often a dream dasher, but we try to make a few dreams come true," he replied.

This is the second largest group of applicants. The largest was in 1978 just before NASA had another huge change and flew the shuttle for the first time.

If you want to apply, make sure you're in great health, have a college degree in engineering, science or math and fill out the application.

(Copyright ©2012 KTRK-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.) Get more Local »

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Houstonians still questioning NASA's decision

 HOUSTON (KTRK) -- Houstonians are still sore after Tuesday's announcement that the Space City would not be receiving one of the retired space shuttle orbiters. We have a look at the pitch local leaders made to NASA and the new effort to find out why the space agency said no.

We wanted to compare the proposals which earned entities a space shuttle to see what those entities said to help persuade NASA to give them one. But NASA will not release those proposals. A spokesman claims the information is proprietary and says applicants were promised confidentiality. Some say that's proof again that this process of selection wasn't as transparent as the space agency would lead us to believe. Houstonians on Wednesday still struggled to make sense of the snub from NASA. "It's really a shame .. And I really regret that," said Mark Bruse. "To me, this was a political decision. There's no way you could've used logic and not include Houston," said Lee Perry. Former Congressman Chris Bell also wonders what happened -- if someone dropped the ball; if Houston did enough, early enough to get a shuttle. They are questions many sources are asking us to investigate. "I don't think we had really put ourselves in a position to win the shuttle," said Bell. He admits no inside knowledge other than his personal experience of how politics works. He says early assumption that so many others would get a shuttle was unnerving. "By the time Houston was weighing in, it seemed like it could very well be too little, too late," Bell said. A 23-page proposal was put together in the hope of brining an orbiter to Space Center Houston. It details the arguments for the shuttle: the 750,000 people annually that would see it inside a 53,000-square foot addition at the facility. The application was delivered to NASA in March 2009. It was backed by a varied coalition of business and area elected leaders. They insist they pushed it for more than two years. "We have done everything we can to get a retired shuttle here. We never took for granted that we would get one," said Bob Mitchell with the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership. Mitchell is calling now for NASA to explain in detail its decision making process, and to release, as we asked, the proposals from those entities chosen to get a shuttle. NASA is not releasing them. "Side by side. Let NASA tell us side by side. Lay them out and show us where we were deficient," Mitchell said. That's something NASA says it's not willing to do. All the more reason, elected officials say, to call for a congressional investigation how recipients of a shuttle were chosen. Elected leaders here in Texas and in Ohio are calling for an investigation into the selection process. Ohio had hoped to get a shuttle, too.
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If you would like to share your thoughts on the retiring shuttle fleet with NASA, you can contact them at: Public Communications Office
NASA Headquarters
Suite 5K39
Washington, DC 20546-0001
202-358-0001 (Office)
202-358-4338 (Fax)
Email: public-inquiries@hq.nasa.gov (Copyright ©2011 KTRK-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)

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