A political effort to remove space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian and place it on display in Texas encountered some pushback on Thursday, as a US senator questioned the expense of carrying out what he described as a theft.
“This is not a transfer. It’s a heist,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) during a budget markup hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee. “A heist by Texas because they lost a competition 12 years ago.”
In April, Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both representing Texas, introduced the “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act” that called for Discovery to be relocated from the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia and displayed at Space Center Houston. They then inserted a provision into the Senate version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which, to comply with Senate rules, was more vaguely worded but was meant to achieve the same goal.
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To be fair, it’s bullshit that Houston didn’t get a space shuttle when they retired them. They went to Florida, California, Virginia, and New York instead.
Houston is called “Space City”. It’s where NASA is located. The phone number to reach the International Space Station has a Houston area code.
They didn’t “lose a competition”. This was a decision made by politicians, and they made the wrong one.
Normally I like Ars Technica, and normally I hate anything Texas politicians are doing. But Houston obviously had the strongest claim to a space shuttle.