It embarked on 25 trips into space, a one-way flight to Los Angeles on top of a 747 and a parade along the city’s surface streets. Now, Space Shuttle Endeavour has added one final expedition to its lengthy travel itinerary: a ride on a high-rise–sized crane.
On Monday night, the California Science Center pitched the 178,000-pound shrink-wrapped orbiter upright and both raised and lowered it via crane into the future Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center. Now displayed in a vertical, ready-to-launch position in front of an orange fuel tank and a pair of rocket boosters (the only space shuttle in the world that can claim that distinction), Endeavour’s successful lift marks the completion of the most major milestone in the museum’s sixth-month-long “Go for Stack” process.
It’ll be another few years before you can step inside the museum and see the retired NASA shuttle up close again, but Angelenos can easily catch a glimpse of it right now—at least the top part of it. The nose half of the orbiter as well as much of the fuel tank and rockets are visible from just about anywhere in Exposition Park right now. The best view of the shuttle is from the plaza or green patch between the Coliseum and BMO Stadium, though you can also get a closer-up but more obscured view near the rose garden to the north. You’ll want to see it soon, though: As construction continues, scaffolding will begin to block some viewpoints of the stack in the next two weeks until eventually it’s completely concealed with a roof over its head.
The museum began its “Go for Stack” process last July by lifting the aft skirts, the rocket boosters’ conical bases, into the construction site via crane. The 116-foot-tall solid rocket motors underwent the same process in November, followed shortly by the forward assemblies atop them. ET-94, the massive orange external fuel tank that had been visible just outside of the former Endeavour exhibition space, joined them earlier this month.
The last piece of the puzzle was the space shuttle itself, which had been on display in a temporary building on the other side of the museum until the end of 2023. The horizontal craft hitched a ride on a transport that brought it closer to the construction site. On Monday night around 9:30pm, as a small crowd gathered on State Drive to watch, a pair of cranes then raised it into an upright position over the course of a half hour or so.
We were invited to watch the rest of the lift from inside the under-construction Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center. After more than two hours spent removing a smaller crane attached to the back of the ship and then getting the angle just right, the space shuttle began its vertical lift shortly after midnight. A 450-foot crane slowly and steadily raised Endeavour up, over into the construction site, close to the fuel tank and then even farther down, a process that took roughly an hour. Then a series of fine adjustments and movements were made until the shuttle achieved a “soft mate” with the stack in the early morning; work on a “hard mate” to secure the flight hardware bolts and nuts followed the next evening.
With the shuttle’s major move now out of the way, the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center will continue to be built around it. After 123 million miles logged around the Earth, Space Shuttle Endeavour spent the past decade on public display inside a temporary tent on the west side of the California Science Center, where you could only walk around and under the shuttle. But this free-to-visit expansion will allow visitors to see the retired NASA spacecraft from multiple viewpoints of varying heights, including from a glass perch atop the nose. The museum hasn’t set an opening date yet, but it initially estimated a three-year construction period at the time of the building’s 2022 groundbreaking.
You can watch the museum’s entire four-and-a-half hour stream of the lift here, as well as check out our video of the lift and more of our photos below.
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