The space shuttle Atlantis was fully unveiled on Friday April 26 at the NASA Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.
The official unveiling came after workers spent two days at the Kennedy Space Center removing the shuttle's protective shrink-wrap cover. The shrink-wrap spanned 16,000 square feet and was used to protect the shuttle as construction of a $100 million exhibition took place around it.
"It looks fantastic," director of project development and construction for Delaware North Parks and Resorts Tim Macy said. "It looks better than I thought it was going to look."
The next major challenge for workers will be opening the payload bay. Since the cargo bay doors were designed to be opened in space, they will be hoisted open in the Kennedy Space Center with lines hung from the five-story building's roof. Once the doors have been opened, visitors who come to the Kennedy Space Center will be able to easily see into the payload bay.
Workers at the Kennedy Space Center wanted to give Atlantis the appearance that it was traveling in space, and accordingly positioned it thirty feet in the air and tilted it 43.21 degrees. Lighting and a mural-size digital screen that will project the Earth's horizon add to the effect.
"It looks great even in the work lights," Macy said. "Wait until we get the theatrical lights on it and light it the way we're supposed to, have that big screen going on behind it, it's going to be awesome."
The Atlantis hall in the Kennedy Space Center will have a large theatre and over 60 displays telling the story of the space shuttle program and its 135 flights.
"It will remind us of the great successes of the shuttle program beginning with the test flights, the satellite deploys and retrievals, the Spacelab and Spacehab missions, the Hubble missions, the Mir program that established a very good relationship with our former cold war enemies, and also with our international partners we built the space station, serviced it," Atlantis flier Eileen Collins said. "We learned what to do right with the design of spacecraft and operations, and we learned what we did wrong, and as we press forward, improve that into better designs as we build the next generation."
