NASA announces shuttle display homes

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., April 12 (UPI) -- NASA says Florida, New York, California and the District of Columbia are its choices for the final homes for its retired space shuttles.

At a ceremony at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. made the long-awaited announcement of where shuttles Discovery, Endeavor and Atlantis would end up, a NASA release said Tuesday.

Discovery, which made its final flight last month, will go to the Smithsonian for display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport.

Once it has Discover, the museum will no long need Enterprise, on display since 2004, and will send it to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan.

Enterprise was used for early glide tests but was never sent into orbit.

The Endeavour, now on its Florida launching pad awaiting its final mission, will go to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

The Atlantis, scheduled for its last launch in June, will go to the Kennedy Space Center visitor complex.

Twenty-one institutions across the country had put in bids for one of the orbiters, The New York Times reported.

Tuesday's announcement came on the anniversaries of two historic moments in space flight: the 50th anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who was the first human in space, and the 30th anniversary of the first launching of a space shuttle, the Columbia, in 1981, the Times said.