New York Barge Driver Smashes Wing of Enterprise
Space shuttle sails through New York Harbor, CNN
“The space shuttle Enterprise took a journey more akin to those of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise than its orbital sister ships on Sunday. The prototype shuttle floated on a barge through New York Harbor, from John F. Kennedy Airport en route to Bayonne, New Jersey.”
Keith’s note: What no one seems to be mentioning is that the guys driving/pulling the barge carrying Enterprise managed to smash the right wing of Enterprise into a dock. Larger image
GeeZ!!!!!!!
It could be worse. Will Riker smashed an entire Enterprise saucer section into a planet!
Yeah, but he was being chased by the Borg!
At least we are keeping up with the Russians. Look what they did to their Enterprise-equivalent’s wing while transporting it to a museum:
http://i575.photobucket.com…
Worse was to come when they hit a house, but I can’t find photos of that right now.
his insurance is gonna go up
It’s not going anywhere.
I don’t know why anyone expected the Intrepid museum to treat Enterprise any better then they have treated their Concorde in the past – http://www.nytimes.com/2008…
Exactly… It’s like they are amateurs. This is a logistical situation that should have been worked in advance – including contingencies for wind of whatever.
All they had to do was use a barge the same width as the wingspan, or build some extra structure onto the barge to protect the wings.
Dang! Now this shuttle will never go into space again!
Wait! Is this the one that never went into space in the first place?
Damned idiot!
“It was like that when I picked it up. Got a problem? Talk to the boss.”
Capt. Kirk, this is why you cannot use full impulse power while docking.
You keep on quoting those regulations
According to CollectSpace (
http://www.collectspace.com…, it was the wind that caused the wing to scrape, not the barge pilot. However, the point remaines…it’s damaged…
They either picked a barge too small or loaded it wrong. Boats bump docks. The is really no way to stop that from happening. It looks like the wing extended beyond the deck of the barge.
New York cabby!
Folks:
Blasphemy! That’s a flight article!
tinker
CNN is too stupid these days to know what is news.
Look at it this way, better a washed up shuttle than the dragon smashing into the ISS!
The barge captain has no excuse for what happened, unless he is a newbie. On the water one takes into consideration the wind, amount of free-board one is towing as well as the tide and compensate to travel the middle. What a jerk.
A little “Bondo”, some sanding, a fresh coat of paint, and it’ll be good as new.
So, I just want to make sure I have the story straight…the flight article gifted to New York was damaged on a barge (at roughly the same time the folks in Houston were taking better care of their non-flight article, which rode on a barge and all the way down NASA Road 1 without incident) while being transported to a temporary shelter because the actual building for it hasn’t been built yet (while a brand new museum building purpose-built to hold an orbiter stands empty in Seattle).
Could someone remind me again why New York got a flight article?
Anyone know a good wing repairman at Grumman, they built the wings nearby in Bethpage. You could get him out of retirement and have Schumer pay the funding for the repair.
Explorer was damaged enroute, far worse than Enterprise, actually. It just hasn’t been reported.
What? I am here at JSC/SCH, the only ‘damage’ was to a couple trees they had to bend back to let it by on NASA Road 1. We could have done a better job, after we (JSC) are still handling the ISS. Good luck to all, keep the faith, cheers.
It was fixed up for the roll spectacle. See a photo of the damage here (the elevons are not real, and are not meant to fold down):
http://forum.nasaspacefligh…
TRFKAE (The Replica Formerly Known As Explorer) is just a replica. Any damage to it during transport is just a cost issue
to patch it back up. It’s not like there is any history to preserve.
Enterprise meanwhile is an important space history artifact. The damaged wingtip is a piece of actual flight hardware used in atmospheric test flights that were critical to the Space Shuttle program. You would expect Enterprise to be treated much more carefully than a replica however the opposite seems to be true.
The only boast that New York can make is that whereas JSC will be placing their replica outside, New York will be protecting
Enterprise with a pup tent.
I am sure all the Space-X fan boys are enjoying this one…….whenever someone does not worship Space-X they always bring up the 2 shuttle accidents…….
There are better pictures of this incident here – http://nycaviation.com/foru… – there was plenty of clearance on the other side of the orbiter, and the wind was blowing AWAY from the structure that it hit.
It looks like the tugboat captain *overcompensated* for the wind and pushed Enterprise into the wall.
As the folks on Collectspace have pointed out, the real problem is going to be the salt spray that is undoubtedly hitting Enterprise and the corrosion it will cause in the future.
OMG!
Who gave the keys to Marina Sirtis? What a short memory that person has. After all she was responsible for crashing the Enterprise D.
Did NYC hire the Three Stooges to move this valuable and irreplaceable piece of history? So nice to see the Intrepid Museum appreciates what they have been given. We’ll see how well they take care of it from here…it doesn’t look good, so far. In a city that still has forty year old pcb containing lights in the public schools to poison children one can’t expect too much…
look at the way Explorer was transported and how Enterprise was
Did NYC take an arrogant attitude when transporting the shuttle (remember they bitched after the announcement that they only got a “fake” shuttle)
See BenC’s image posted in the earlier part of the thread. Explorer had damage to both wings.
In my experience with NY, people there bitch about anything.
At least this time we know that he foam is not to blame.
Steve
Poetic Justice? Nah!
This reminds me of the Saturn-V vehicles left over from the cancelled (should have flown) Apollo 18 and 19 missions and a backup Skylab launch vehicle, sitting at Houston, Kennedy, and Huntsville, in the elements and deteriorating until people woke up and now they are restored and in proper indoor facilities. Another case is the Skylab mock up at Huntsville, still rotting away outdoors. The crazy thing with the Skylab mock up that it was removed from indoors, replaced by a mock up of a portion of the Mir space station and later the area was taken over by Space Camp.
And leave it the committee that decided where the three orbiters and Enterprise would go, kissing Congress’ ass, and California Science Center getting Endeavour and Houston winding up with a full scale replica? Houston should have been the home for Endeavour and Enterprise should have been donated to the California Science Center and the Intrepid museum getting the mock up.
The economy is still in the doldrums and it will be difficult to get rich donors to pony up to the bar to fund facilities at the California Science Center and the Intrepid museum. I give it five years and we will be reading that the Intrepid museum and the California Science Center cannot fund proper facilities to protect Enterprise and Endeavour, and they will be deteriorating. I sincerely hope I am proven wrong.
Massive artifacts with significant historical context, like these vehicles, need to be preserved, with careful decision making based on preservation instead of cowering to politicians. The decisions should be based on whether the caretakers can adequately preserve them for generations of people to learn about their historical significance.