Author Topic: OV-101 Enterprise – It’s Been A Long Way (Read 147108 times)

Ares67 · « **Reply #326 on:** 10/18/2014 08:36 pm »

After completion of the Vandenberg tests, Enterprise was ferried to Dryden on May 24, 1985, for storage until September 20, 1985, when she was flown to KSC. For two months OV-101 sat alongside the Saturn V rocket in the parking lot of the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building. Tourists loved it and on October 22, 1985, spectators at KSC beheld the spectacular sight of Enterprise, from a front-row seat, being witness to her sister ship Challenger successfully roaring into space for the final time.

On November 18, 1985, Enterprise arrived at Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C., and NASA handed her officially over to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM). OV-101 was stored in a hangar at Dulles, awaiting the Smithsonian to construct a “large aircraft annex” at the airport.

Ares67 · « **Reply #327 on:** 10/18/2014 08:39 pm »

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Ares67 · « **Reply #329 on:** 10/18/2014 08:44 pm »

Ares67 · « **Reply #330 on:** 10/18/2014 08:46 pm »

MOMENTS IN THE SUN

The Enterprise continued to find use. There was concern that the brakes of an operational orbiter might fail following touchdown; if that happened, an arresting barrier might prevent the vehicle from overrunning its runway. During the week of June 8, 1987, a landing barrier, similar to ones used by the military to catch damaged aircraft, was erected at Dulles and Enterprise was slowly winched into it to determine if an orbiter could successfully use one without being damaged. Later in 1987, OV-101 was used for tests of the various crew bailout concepts being investigated in response to the Challenger accident.

A somewhat more impromptu test in 1990 involved an antenna for the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment (SAREX). No operational orbiter was available as a test bed for the new antenna, while windows of shuttle mockups lacked the right type of glass. Enterprise filled the need. Experimenters mounted their antenna within one of her windows, which indeed was of the proper material. An antenna based on this design subsequently flew aboard the orbiter Discovery, early in 1995, and communicated with the Russian space station Mir.

For Enterprise, however, such moments in the sun proved few and far between. From time to time NASA engineers have taken to cannibalizing Enterprise to use parts of the orbiter for a variety of tests. In 1990 they borrowed a main landing gear, in 1997 the nose landing gear to support structural tests and orbiter upgrades, and in 1999 samples of wires were taken out for tests when the other four operational orbiters had serious problems with their Kapton wires. The wires in Enterprise were the oldest available to NASA for tests.

On February 5-9, 1996, a team from JSC inspected Enterprise to determine her structural condition since there were proposals that involved refurbishing the airframe for use as an additional flight vehicle. Although the team could not conduct a thorough inspection due to the way Enterprise was positioned in her temporary storage location at Dulles, a fairly complete visual inspection was accomplished. Overall, the team found the vehicle to be in “fairly good condition” considering its long-term exposure to the elements. However, the engineering studies of its suitability for refurbishment as an unpiloted orbiter brought no follow-up.

For two weeks at the end of June 1997, JSC engineers conducted an evaluation of the structural integrity of the payload bay doors on Enterprise to determine if the composite construction had degraded due to environmental exposure over the years. JSC was interested in the conditions of the doors in case a replacement was needed in the future for an operational orbiter. The non-destructive evaluation was accomplished using state-of-the-art shearography inspection techniques. The inspection showed that the OV-101 doors were still in serviceable condition and could be used after refurbishment if required.

Ares67 · « **Reply #331 on:** 10/18/2014 08:48 pm »

Ares67 · « **Reply #332 on:** 10/18/2014 08:54 pm »

Ares67 · « **Reply #333 on:** 10/18/2014 08:56 pm »

In April 2003, in the wake of the loss of the orbiter Columbia, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) requested that the main landing gear door of Enterprise would be needed for tile tests. The left main landing gear door of Enterprise was flown to KSC and in one of the Orbiter Processing Facilities workers placed the TPS tiles on it. After that was completed the door was transferred to the Southwest Research Institute for impact testing. The CAIB also used part of Enterprise’s left wing; the T-seals were used for foam impact tests in June and July 2003.

Ares67 · « **Reply #334 on:** 10/18/2014 08:58 pm »

Shortly after that, in November 2003, the Enterprise was rolled out into the open for the first time in nearly two decades and was moved to the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar at the new Smithsonian NASM companion facility next to the Dulles Airport, the Steven Ferencz Udvar-Hazy Center, which opened its gates in December 2003. However, the 53,000-square foot space hangar was not accessible to the public until November 1, 2004, because Enterprise needed to undergo some cleaning work and other artifacts had to be moved in.

(Jacques van Oene, “First Space Shuttle Set For Retirement,” Spaceflight, Vol. 45, October 2003; Dennis R. Jenkins, “Space Shuttle,” 1996/2001; Thomas A. Heppenheimer, “Development of the Space Shuttle 1972-1981, History of the Space Shuttle, Vol. 2,” Smithsonian Institution Press – edited)

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