{"id":43900,"date":"2025-07-11T23:57:27","date_gmt":"2025-07-11T15:57:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/its-a-heist-senator-calls-out-texas-for-trying-to-steal-shuttle-from-smithsonian\/"},"modified":"2025-07-11T23:57:27","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T15:57:27","slug":"its-a-heist-senator-calls-out-texas-for-trying-to-steal-shuttle-from-smithsonian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/its-a-heist-senator-calls-out-texas-for-trying-to-steal-shuttle-from-smithsonian\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s a heist\u201d: Senator calls out Texas for trying to steal shuttle from Smithsonian"},"content":{"rendered":"

A political effort to remove space shuttle Discovery<\/em> from the Smithsonian and place it on display in Texas encountered some pushback on Thursday, as a US senator questioned the expense of carrying out what he described as a theft.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not a transfer. It\u2019s a heist,\u201d said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) during a budget markup hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee. \u201cA heist by Texas because they lost a competition 12 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

In April, Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both representing Texas, introduced the \u201cBring the Space Shuttle Home Act\u201d that called for Discovery<\/em> to be relocated from the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia and displayed at Space Center Houston. They then inserted a provision into the Senate version of the \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill,\u201d which, to comply with Senate rules, was more vaguely worded but was meant to achieve the same goal.<\/p>\n

That bill was enacted on July 4, when President Donald Trump signed it into law.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am glad to see this pass as part of the Senate\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill and look forward to welcoming Discovery<\/em> to Houston and righting this egregious wrong,\u201d Cornyn said in a statement. \u201cHouston has long been the cornerstone of our nation\u2019s human space exploration program, and it\u2019s long overdue for Space City to receive the recognition it deserves by bringing Space Shuttle Discovery<\/em> home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not enough money<\/h2>\n

That might have been the end of it, were it not for two concerns raised by Durbin on Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the reconciliation bill, Texas entered $85 million to move the space shuttle from the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia, to Texas. Eighty-five million dollars sounds like a lot of money, but it is not nearly what\u2019s necessary for this to be accomplished,\u201d Durbin said.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

Citing research by NASA and the Smithsonian, Durbin said that the total was closer to $305 million and that did not include the estimated $178 million needed to build a facility to house and display Discover<\/em>y once in Houston.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, it was unclear if Congress even has the right to remove an artifact, let alone a space shuttle, from the Smithsonian\u2019s collection. The Washington, DC, institution, which serves as a trust instrumentality of the US, maintains that it owns Discovery.<\/em> The paperwork signed by NASA in 2012 transferred \u201call rights, interest, title, and ownership\u201d for the spacecraft to the Smithsonian.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis will be the first time ever in the history of the Smithsonian someone has taken one of their displays and forcibly taken possession of it. What are we doing here? They don\u2019t have the right in Texas to claim this,\u201d said Durbin.<\/p>\n

Houston was not the only city to miss out on displaying a retired space shuttle. In 2011, Durbin and fellow Illinois Senator Mark Kirk appealed to NASA to exhibit one of the winged spacecraft at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. The agency ultimately decided to award the shuttles to the National Air and Space Museum, the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, and the California Science Center in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

Houston, we have a problem<\/h2>\n

A prototype orbiter that was exhibited where Discovery<\/em> is now was transferred to the Intrepid Museum in New York City.<\/p>\n

To be able to bring up his points at Thursday\u2019s hearing, Durbin introduced the \u201cHouston, We Have a Problem\u201d amendment to \u201cprohibit the use of funds to transfer a decommissioned space shuttle from one location to another location.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then withdrew the amendment after having voiced his objections.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we\u2019re dealing with something called waste. Eighty-five million dollars worth of waste. I know that this is a controversial issue, and I know that there are other agencies, Smithsonian, NASA, and others that are interested in this issue; I\u2019m going to withdraw this amendment, but I\u2019m going to ask my colleagues to be honest about it,\u201d said Durbin. \u201cI hope that we think about this long and hard.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A political effort to remove space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian and place it on display in Texas encountered some pushback on Thursday, as a US senator questioned the expense of carrying out what he described as a theft. \u201cThis is not a transfer. It\u2019s a heist,\u201d said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) during a budget […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43900"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}