Space Shuttle Puzzle : Are Engine Mock-Ups in the Smithsonian or in a Palmdale Dump?

Depending on whom you believe, an important part of this country’s space exploration history is either in the Smithsonian Institution or decaying in the hot sun in a Palmdale landfill.

Space shuttle builder Rockwell International says it sent a set of shuttle engine mock-ups--huge nozzles used in the test program for the Enterprise, the first orbiter built--to the dump more than a decade ago.

But the objects Rockwell says were dumped sound just like what the National Air and Space Museum in Washington believes it has in its collection. The museum says the nozzles are still attached to the back of the Enterprise, a non-flying orbiter used for testing in the late 1970s that was donated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to the museum in 1985.

The mock-ups were used in approach and landing tests that included putting the Enterprise atop a modified 747 and releasing it 26,000 feet above the expansive dry lake beds at Edwards Air Force Base to see if it could glide to an unpowered landing.

Rockwell officials said just one set of the mock-ups were built--and they are at the dump.

“If the real approach and landing nozzles are out there in California, then what do we have?” asked Valerie Neal, a curator for the museum’s department of space history.

Fred Valentino, who has been general manager of the Palmdale dump for nearly two decades, said the three shuttle engine nozzles--which were designed to simulate the size, shape and weight of the real space shuttle main engines--arrived at the landfill several years ago during the town’s annual cleanup week.

Rockwell, which builds the space shuttles at its facility at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, no longer had a use for the nozzles and so, with the blessing of the government, disposed of them.

“Rather than storing them, because they have no functional value or purpose down the line, Rockwell and NASA property managers decided to dispose of them,” said Alan Buis, a spokesman for Rockwell Space Systems Division. “That’s how they ended up where they currently are.”

But museum curator Neal is confident that Rockwell is mistaken about what it sent to the dump.

“I talked to a couple people who were here when Enterprise was delivered,” she said. “We were never notified that anything on Enterprise was not part of the test configuration.”

If Rockwell is right, however, historians and museum curators fear that a piece of history is weathering in the desert sun, in a dump, no less.

“That is disturbing,” said Derek Elliott, who was curator of the Air and Space Museum’s manned space collection at the time Enterprise arrived.

Elliott, now a history professor at Tennessee State University in Nashville, said that when Enterprise was given to the museum, no one thought to ask if the nozzles were the ones used in the tests at Edwards AFB. It was just assumed they were.

Through an agreement between NASA and the Smithsonian, NASA is supposed to offer anything considered a potential artifact to the museum before discarding it. It is possible that when the nozzles were dumped, the process broke down, Elliott said.

“Even if we didn’t acquire them, I can almost guarantee some other space history museum or center would be interested in something like that,” he said. “It’s part of this nation’s history, the history of the space shuttle.”

But items that historians and curators believe significant are not always judged as such by others.

“It’s not unique that you found engine mock-ups in a dump in California,” said James Hartsfield, NASA shuttle program spokesman at the Johnson Space Center in Texas.

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Various junked mock-ups from the Apollo program can be found at landfills near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, he said.

Meanwhile, Palmdale landfill manager Valentino is not all that eager to give up what he sees as his piece of space history.

Although he has never been sure exactly what they were, he has kept the mock-ups from being buried under tons of grass clippings, tin cans and used tires. They sit near an old, discarded dinghy and appear to be used as a resting place and toilet facility for the many birds that frequent the landfill.

It may not be the Smithsonian, but Valentino says he is eventually going to put the three engine nozzles on display and show them during tours.