SPACE/COSMOS
Trump’s tax bill would send an iconic Smithsonian spacecraft to Texas
Marie-Rose Sheinerman, (c) 2025 , The Washington Post
Thu, July 3, 2025
The Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum could lose the iconic Discovery space shuttle to Houston if a pair of Texas senators get their way.
President Donald Trump’s massive tax and immigration bill passed the Senate on Tuesday with language effectively ordering the shuttle’s move to Texas. It would set aside $85 million to transport Discovery and construct a home for it at Space Center Houston, the official visitor center for NASA’s Johnson Space Center - which itself oversaw more than 100 shuttle launches over three decades.
But the Smithsonian, which has housed the shuttle at its Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Northern Virginia since 2012, estimated that the true cost would be north of $300 million. That includes the cost of the transfer, the new facility to house it, prep for an alternative museum display at the Smithsonian and other related costs.
The House approved the bill on Thursday afternoon, and Trump is expected to sign it into law.
More than a dozen years ago, NASA chose the final resting places of Discovery and its three siblings after the agency ended the space shuttle program. Notably, none of the four winning sites were in Texas - a decision that was decried as a “snub” by 16 members of Texas’s congressional delegation at the time and continues to rankle the state’s Senate Republicans, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, who backed the new provision.
Cornyn said in a statement that he looks “forward to welcoming Discovery to Houston and righting this egregious wrong.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Cornyn called the Smithsonian’s cost estimate “purposefully overblown,” adding that “an outside vendor skilled at moving military equipment like tanks, military aircraft larger than a space shuttle, and the shuttle mock-up has estimated the total cost to be between $5-$8 million.” That cost estimate, the spokesperson said, includes transporting the shuttle from the Smithsonian to a barge, the trip on the barge to Houston (via the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico) and the transfer from the barge to Space Center Houston.
Others, including former astronauts, said moving Discovery from its current home in the D.C. suburbs doesn’t make sense - in large part because the highly modified Boeing 747 originally used to transport the shuttles piggyback-style is no longer available. When the shuttle arrived at the Smithsonian by air in 2012, preparations for the transfer took nearly a year.
“I’m not even sure how this could be accomplished,” John Grunsfeld, a veteran of five shuttle flights who served as NASA’s chief scientist, said in an email to The Washington Post.
Discovery’s voyage to the Smithsonian museum in 2012 was relatively simple compared with the journeys of other shuttles, in part due to the facility’s proximity to Washington Dulles International Airport. In Los Angeles, 400 trees were cut down to clear a path for the last leg of Endeavour’s trip to the California Science Center.
“I’m not even sure exactly how they would go about transferring it all the way to Houston without that airplane,” said Garrett Reisman, a former astronaut who flew on the Discovery and called the proposal “ludicrous and unnecessary.”
Democrats in Congress have echoed those criticisms as the bill has progressed, and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) unsuccessfully sought to strip the space-shuttle language from the bill.
A spokesperson for NASA declined to comment.
A document circulated among some members of Congress by the Smithsonian, and viewed by The Post, cites a cost estimate by the former NASA program manager who coordinated the 2011 relocation of the entire shuttle fleet. The document said the cost to transport Discovery to Houston would be about $35 million by air and ground or $40 million by barge and ground.
The Smithsonian also said in a statement that given the “extremely complex and difficult” move, the threat of damage to the spacecraft would be “significant.”
“Any time you transport any kind of museum object of that size, there’s always a threat of damage, one way or another,” said Edward McManus, a former conservator at the National Air and Space Museum, who opposes the transfer.
The move by the Texas senators, who originally proposed a separate bill in April to transfer the space shuttle, sets up a fight between two of the most prominent aerospace education centers in the country - a battle that at least some in the space community find harmful.
“I would much rather see that money invested in NASA’s science program,” Reisman said, especially given how sharply the White House wants to cut the agency’s research funding. “If you’re going to cut that and then cough up hundreds of millions of dollars into this for what is essentially a political mission - two senators who are concerned only about what’s best for their state and not what’s best for the country - I find that to be just a travesty.”
For the Smithsonian, the potential transfer of a key installation would be “unprecedented,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Discovery’s presence at the Smithsonian is part of the Institution’s core function as a research facility and object library.”
But at Space Center Houston, which would construct a building to accommodate the shuttle, news that it could soon house the spacecraft is a point of deep honor and pride. “It’s part of the DNA of our region,” said William Harris, the president and CEO of the museum. Having the space shuttle “holds a special meaning for people from Houston.”
As the site of the Johnson Space Center, the city has played a central role in NASA’s space programs since the agency was founded in the early 1960s.
“Houston has long stood at the heart of America’s human spaceflight program, and this legislation rightly honors that legacy,” Cruz said in a statement.
Marie-Rose Sheinerman,
Thu, July 3, 2025
The Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum could lose the iconic Discovery space shuttle to Houston if a pair of Texas senators get their way.
President Donald Trump’s massive tax and immigration bill passed the Senate on Tuesday with language effectively ordering the shuttle’s move to Texas. It would set aside $85 million to transport Discovery and construct a home for it at Space Center Houston, the official visitor center for NASA’s Johnson Space Center - which itself oversaw more than 100 shuttle launches over three decades.
But the Smithsonian, which has housed the shuttle at its Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Northern Virginia since 2012, estimated that the true cost would be north of $300 million. That includes the cost of the transfer, the new facility to house it, prep for an alternative museum display at the Smithsonian and other related costs.
The House approved the bill on Thursday afternoon, and Trump is expected to sign it into law.
More than a dozen years ago, NASA chose the final resting places of Discovery and its three siblings after the agency ended the space shuttle program. Notably, none of the four winning sites were in Texas - a decision that was decried as a “snub” by 16 members of Texas’s congressional delegation at the time and continues to rankle the state’s Senate Republicans, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, who backed the new provision.
Cornyn said in a statement that he looks “forward to welcoming Discovery to Houston and righting this egregious wrong.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Cornyn called the Smithsonian’s cost estimate “purposefully overblown,” adding that “an outside vendor skilled at moving military equipment like tanks, military aircraft larger than a space shuttle, and the shuttle mock-up has estimated the total cost to be between $5-$8 million.” That cost estimate, the spokesperson said, includes transporting the shuttle from the Smithsonian to a barge, the trip on the barge to Houston (via the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico) and the transfer from the barge to Space Center Houston.
Others, including former astronauts, said moving Discovery from its current home in the D.C. suburbs doesn’t make sense - in large part because the highly modified Boeing 747 originally used to transport the shuttles piggyback-style is no longer available. When the shuttle arrived at the Smithsonian by air in 2012, preparations for the transfer took nearly a year.
“I’m not even sure how this could be accomplished,” John Grunsfeld, a veteran of five shuttle flights who served as NASA’s chief scientist, said in an email to The Washington Post.
Discovery’s voyage to the Smithsonian museum in 2012 was relatively simple compared with the journeys of other shuttles, in part due to the facility’s proximity to Washington Dulles International Airport. In Los Angeles, 400 trees were cut down to clear a path for the last leg of Endeavour’s trip to the California Science Center.
“I’m not even sure exactly how they would go about transferring it all the way to Houston without that airplane,” said Garrett Reisman, a former astronaut who flew on the Discovery and called the proposal “ludicrous and unnecessary.”
Democrats in Congress have echoed those criticisms as the bill has progressed, and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) unsuccessfully sought to strip the space-shuttle language from the bill.
A spokesperson for NASA declined to comment.
A document circulated among some members of Congress by the Smithsonian, and viewed by The Post, cites a cost estimate by the former NASA program manager who coordinated the 2011 relocation of the entire shuttle fleet. The document said the cost to transport Discovery to Houston would be about $35 million by air and ground or $40 million by barge and ground.
The Smithsonian also said in a statement that given the “extremely complex and difficult” move, the threat of damage to the spacecraft would be “significant.”
“Any time you transport any kind of museum object of that size, there’s always a threat of damage, one way or another,” said Edward McManus, a former conservator at the National Air and Space Museum, who opposes the transfer.
The move by the Texas senators, who originally proposed a separate bill in April to transfer the space shuttle, sets up a fight between two of the most prominent aerospace education centers in the country - a battle that at least some in the space community find harmful.
“I would much rather see that money invested in NASA’s science program,” Reisman said, especially given how sharply the White House wants to cut the agency’s research funding. “If you’re going to cut that and then cough up hundreds of millions of dollars into this for what is essentially a political mission - two senators who are concerned only about what’s best for their state and not what’s best for the country - I find that to be just a travesty.”
For the Smithsonian, the potential transfer of a key installation would be “unprecedented,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Discovery’s presence at the Smithsonian is part of the Institution’s core function as a research facility and object library.”
But at Space Center Houston, which would construct a building to accommodate the shuttle, news that it could soon house the spacecraft is a point of deep honor and pride. “It’s part of the DNA of our region,” said William Harris, the president and CEO of the museum. Having the space shuttle “holds a special meaning for people from Houston.”
As the site of the Johnson Space Center, the city has played a central role in NASA’s space programs since the agency was founded in the early 1960s.
“Houston has long stood at the heart of America’s human spaceflight program, and this legislation rightly honors that legacy,” Cruz said in a statement.
Clingy Planets Can Trigger Own Doom
Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught a clingy exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s thick atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year. This infographic explains the process. CREDIT: ESA
Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.
This is the first-ever evidence for a ‘planet with a death wish’. Though it was theorised to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.
This planet’s star makes our Sun look sleepy
Thanks to telescopes like the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), we already had some clues about this planet and the star it orbits.
The star, named HIP 67522, was known to be just slightly larger and cooler than our own host star, the Sun. But whilst the Sun is a middle-aged 4.5-billion-year-old, HIP 67522 is a fresh-faced 17-million-year-old. It bears two planets. The closer of the two – given the catchy name HIP 67522 b – takes just seven days to whip around its host star.
Because of its youth and size, scientists suspected that star HIP 67522 would churn and spin with lots of energy. This churning and spinning would turn the star into a powerful magnet.
Our much-older Sun has its own smaller and more peaceful magnetic field. From studying the Sun, we already knew that flares of energy can burst from magnetic stars when ‘twisted’ magnetic field lines are suddenly released. This energy can take the form of anything from gentle radio waves to visible light to aggressive gamma rays.
A la carte research with Cheops
Ever since the first exoplanet was discovered in the 1990s, astronomers have pondered whether some of them might be orbiting close enough to disturb their host stars’ magnetic fields. If so, they could be triggering flares.
A team led by Ekaterina Ilin at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) figured that with our current space telescopes, it was time to investigate this question further.
“We hadn’t seen any systems like HIP 67522 before; when the planet was found it was the youngest planet known to be orbiting its host star in less than 10 days,” says Ekaterina.
The team was using TESS to do a broad sweep of stars that might be flaring because of an interaction with their planets. When TESS turned its eyes to HIP 67522, the team thought they could be on to something. To be sure, they called upon ESA’s sensitive CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite, Cheops.
“We quickly requested observing time with Cheops, which can target individual stars on demand, ultra precisely,” says Ekaterina. “With Cheops we saw more flares, taking the total count to 15, almost all coming in our direction as the planet transited in front of the star as seen from Earth.”
Because we are seeing the flares as the planet passes in front of the star, it is very likely that they are being triggered by the planet.
A flaring star is nothing new. Our own Sun regularly releases bursts of energy, which we experience on Earth as ‘space weather’ that causes the auroras and can damage technology. But we’ve only ever seen this energy exchange as a one-way street from star to planet.
Knowing that HIP 67522 b orbits extremely close to its host star, and assuming that the star’s magnetic field is strong, Ekaterina’s team deduced that the clingy HIP 67522 b sits close enough to exert its own magnetic influence on its host star.
They think that the planet gathers energy as it orbits, then redirects that energy as waves along the star’s magnetic field lines, as if whipping a rope. When the wave meets the end of the magnetic field line at the star’s surface, it triggers a massive flare.
It’s the first time we see a planet influencing its host star, overturning our previous assumption that stars behave independently.
And not only is HIP 67522 b triggering flares, but it is also triggering them in its own direction. As a result, the planet experiences six times more radiation than it otherwise would.
A self-imposed downfall
Unsurprisingly, being bombarded with so much high-energy radiation does not bode well for HIP 67522 b. The planet is similar in size to Jupiter but has the density of candy floss, making it one of the wispiest exoplanets ever found.
Over time, the radiation is eroding away the planet’s feathery atmosphere, meaning it is losing mass much faster than expected. In the next 100 million years, it could go from an almost Jupiter-sized planet to a much smaller Neptune-sized planet.
“The planet seems to be triggering particularly energetic flares,” points out Ekaterina. “The waves it sends along the star’s magnetic field lines kick off flares at specific moments. But the energy of the flares is much higher than the energy of the waves. We think that the waves are setting off explosions that are waiting to happen.”
More questions than answers
When HIP 67522 was found, it was the youngest known planet orbiting so close to its host star. Since then, astronomers have spotted a couple of similar systems and there are probably dozens more in the nearby Universe. Ekaterina and her team are keen to take a closer look at these unique systems with TESS, Cheops and other exoplanet missions.
“I have a million questions because this is a completely new phenomenon, so the details are still not clear,” she says.
“There are two things that I think are most important to do now. The first is to follow up in different wavelengths (Cheops covers visible to near-infrared wavelengths) to find out what kind of energy is being released in these flares – for example ultraviolet and X-rays are especially bad news for the exoplanet.
“The second is to find and study other similar star-planet systems; by moving from a single case to a group of 10–100 systems, theoretical astronomers will have something to work with.”
Maximillian Günther, Cheops project scientist at ESA, is excited to see the mission contributing to research in a way that he never thought possible: “Cheops was designed to characterise the sizes and atmospheres of exoplanets, not to look for flares. It’s really beautiful to see the mission contributing to this and other results that go so far beyond what it was envisioned to do.”
Looking further ahead, ESA’s future exoplanet hunter Plato will also study Sun-like stars like HIP 67522. Plato will be able to capture much smaller flares to really give us the detail that we need to better understand what is going on.
