One of the most exciting and challenging aspects of the California Science Center’s $400 million Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center project to create a space shuttle exhibit took place on January 29. a steel sling designed by NASA and lifted it front and rear with two cranes in the air. Once the shuttle was high enough, the back of the sling was lowered and the larger crane, which can lift 750 metric tons, continued to lift the spacecraft vertically.
“Movement and ascent is one of the biggest challenges of the project,” says Jeffrey Rudolph, president and CEO of the California Science Center. “This is the first time anything like this has been done before. The shuttle is essentially a big glider and we’re lifting it 300 feet in the air, so we have to be very careful and precise, and if there’s wind, it’s a serious problem.”
Endeavor successfully completed 25 missions in space, including the first mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as the first mission to add a US component to the International Space Station.
Three days earlier, crews covered Endeavor in industrial-strength shrink wrap and rolled it a few hundred meters across campus to its new location, next to its rockets and fuel tank.
When the bottom of the shuttle was high enough to clear a roughly 100-foot-high wall, crews lowered it and attached it to its two rocket boosters and the 180-foot-tall external tank. Special, heavy-duty tag lines and blankets were used on the wings to help stabilize the boat and get it in the right position.
Rudolph says this is the first time a space shuttle has been stacked with its flight components for display anywhere in the world. He says that when NASA put other shuttles together for launches, they had platforms and elevators to help connect parts, but here they were in tight spaces, requiring scaffolding.
Photo courtesy of the California Space CenterAfter the approximately four-hour mating process was completed, the teams erected scaffolding covered with plywood and Kevlar fabric to protect the complete shuttle stack from the elements and construction. The team can now finish building the 200,000-square-foot structure that will house Endeavour’s 20-story vertical exhibit, along with 150 educational exhibits spanning three galleries in the four-story Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center.
The shuttle stack exposure weighs approximately 500,000 pounds and sits atop a base seismic isolation pad that is approximately 8 feet thick, 45 feet wide, and 75 feet long.
The Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center design will take a look at the shuttle and the technology used to build it, says Ted Hyman, managing partner of ZGF Architects. Visitors will enter the shuttle display from the third floor and see the ship completely upright in the launch position, with the curved building “essentially evaporating” behind it, he says. “The idea is to make it feel like you’re out there on the launch pad watching the shuttle in the dark, ready for liftoff.”
The project, which is now around 50% complete, was designed by ZGF, with Arup as structural engineer and MATT Construction as construction lead. Evidence Design is responsible for the design of the exhibition. The rest of the work includes building facades, interior work, all MEP and life safety systems, and roof closure around the Shuttle stack.
Rudolph says the project should be completed in about three years.
“The space around the shuttle stack wants to be wide open both to enclose the stack over its 80 feet in width and depth and 180 feet in height, as well as to provide space around the stack to see’ ls from various places, angles and points of view,” says Amie Nulman, associate director at Arup. “To achieve that, we basically designed a 200-foot-high ceiling.”
The team used cantilever concrete shear walls for the lower third of the hall, then an approximately 140-foot-tall steel roof structure / diagrid-type roof structure for the remaining height. “And in order to lessen the risk of the building enclosing the Shuttle Stack artifact collapsing on top of it during an earthquake, we used performance-based design, or alternative means of building code compliance, to design the “high diagrid steel. reinforced frame roof to a higher level of seismic performance than a typical building code-based design,” says Nulman.
