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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea to store the shuttle outdoors, building the museum around it. But the article is frustrating.

  > The cranes that will lift the spacecraft are quite tall — the tallest of which will be about the height of City Hall.

And how tall is City Hall? I get that this is a local publication, but do all LA residents even know how tall City Hall is?

  > At liftoff, the white rocket boosters were set underneath the shuttle’s wings and produced more than 80% of the lift.

The boosters provided thrust, not lift.

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That article is hilariously waffly. And I almost posted the exact City Hall quote.

The pedant in me wants to point out that the external tank is not "Endeavour's" because the external tanks were not recovered after flights so that one has never been on a mission and could have been a tank for any shuttle mission.

> The pedant in me wants to point out that the external tank is not "Endeavour's" because the external tanks were not recovered after flights so that one has never been on a mission and could have been a tank for any shuttle mission.

It sure is Endeavour’s now, for hopefully many decades longer than any other tank.

Yes, it struck me that the article missed all comment on interesting, relevant points about the tanks, such as how they were not recovered after launch, and therefore the actual existence of this last one should have warranted comment.

I suppose that the external tanks may have been commissioned for specific missions, like Atlas IV and Delta V rockets were. Maybe this tank was commissioned for a mission that never flew, like the current museum Saturn Vs.

I remember, possibly incorrectly, that there was a contingency rescue mission stacked but not flown, though I think that the stack did fly on a NASA designated mission (as opposed to the usual Congress designated missions). Though I think that was Atlantis.

    The external tank destined for display at the California Science Center is 
    ET-94, the last flight-qualified external tank in existence. This lightweight 
    tank (LWT) — donated to the Science Center by NASA — was ordered to support 
    science missions for space shuttle Columbia.

From https://californiasciencecenter.org/exhibits/endeavour-exper...

Columbia, really? So there were about a dozen later launches that this tank could have flown on but didn't.

I know that the ETs were updated after Columbia was lost, but I did not realize that a complete tank was built before the changes, yet not flown.

There are lots of "stories" like this from space programs. The ESA "lost" the fuel tanks for their last Vega launch because they were just sitting around for so long they got crushed down into scrap metal because they were not entered into their asset management software.[0]

[0] https://europeanspaceflight.com/the-case-of-the-missing-vega...

The write-up continues a bit after my quote, they say that this one had pieces of foam removed as part of the post-accident investigations.

I feel a bit sad about that. Thanks for sharing the link though.

> And how tall is City Hall?

Around 2.75 Libraries of Congress.

The LA City Hall's height is about 1.5 football fields.

Or about 4445 attoparsec, just to use a more universal unit.

Would those be European or African football fields?

Imperial or metric football?

Eagle units of course.

This is unironically correct; the American measurement system is known as the United States Customary System, Imperial is the British measurement system.

I know this is a worn out trope (that has a name which I cannot recall now) but I feel like repeating: when you find misleading explanations and factual deficiencies in an article whose subject matter you're familiar with, you can reasonably extrapolate that everything else you read about is likely fraught with the same level of veracity.

Los Angeles city hall is an icon and this is a local paper.

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