Houston passed over for retiring space shuttle

HOUSTON (Houston Chronicle) — Texas leaders accused NASA on Tuesday of allowing politics to dictate which sites across the country received retiring space shuttles, and some clamored for a congressional investigation into how decision-makers could have passed over Houston's Johnson Space Center and its "Mission Control."

Twenty-one locations nationally had been in the running. The final decision: Atlantis will stay in Cape Canaveral, Fla., at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex; Endeavour is headed to the California Science Center, near the plant where the shuttle was built; Discovery's new home will be the Smithsonian Institution's branch in northern Virginia; and New York City's Intrepid Museum will get the prototype Enterprise, currently housed in the Smithsonian.

And Houston?

It will have to settle for such shuttle artifacts as seats for the flight deck pilot and commander.

"It's really just a slap in the face," said Ed Emmett, chief executive of Harris County, which includes Houston.