NASA chief Jared Isaacman says Texas may get a moonship, not space shuttle Discovery
NASA's new chief Jared Isaacman said controversial proposal to move the space shuttle Discovery to Texas from its current home in a Smithsonian Air and Space Museum hangar in Virginia, may end with a different spacecraft entirely landing in Houston.

Space shuttle Discovery on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia. (Image credit: Smithsonian/Dane Penland)
Houston, we may have a problem ... for your senators' plans to bring a NASA space shuttle to Texas.
NASA's new chief Jared Isaacman said a controversial proposal to move the space shuttle Discovery to Texas from its current home on display at a Smithsonian Air and Space Museum hangar in Virginia, may end with a different spacecraft entirely landing in Houston.
The plan to move space shuttle Discovery, NASA's most-flown orbiter, to Houston was originally laid out by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). The Texas senators included a provision for the move in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law over the summer.
Cruz and Cornyn have said that Houston, home to NASA's Johnson Space Center where astronauts train and Mission Control is located, should have its own iconic human spaceflight vehicle on display. Discovery flew 39 space missions between 1984 and 2011, when NASA shuttered the shuttle program.
NASA's other retired shuttles - Atlantis, Endeavour and Enterprise test vehicle, which never reached space - are on display at museums in Florida, California and New York City, respectively. Two other shuttles, Challenger and Columbia, were lost in tragic space accidents in 1986 and 2003, respectively.
But there's a catch to moving Discovery. (Several of them, actually.) NASA gave the shuttle to the Smithsonian outright in 2012, so moving it to Houston would require the government to claw back the orbiter.
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