How a team of engineers a built the most spectacular museum exhibit in the solar system
The California Science Center (CSC) has just unveiled the most impressive museum exhibit I’ve ever seen by a margin of 3 parsecs: the space shuttle Endeavour, standing fully vertical, mated to real solid rocket boosters and the last remaining flight-qualified external fuel tank—exactly as it would have looked at the Kennedy Space Center on Launch Complex 39A. Endeavour was the last orbiter ever built, conceived as a replacement for Challenger, and flew its maiden mission in May 1992. Across 25 missions and nearly 299 days in space, it traveled more than 122,883 million miles and orbited Earth 4,671 times. It conducted the first servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, carried the first American component of the International Space Station (ISS) to orbit, and conducted the first in-orbit repair of a cracked shuttle windshield. Its final flight, STS-134, launched in May 2011 and delivered the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the ISS—a cosmic ray detector designed to search for dark matter and antimatter. When Endeavour touched down at Kennedy Space Center on June 1, 2011, it was never to fly again. Now, this piece of history is the centerpiece of the CSC’s new Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center. I don’t think there’s a more extraordinary museum exhibit in the world. Jeff Rudolph, president and CEO of the California Science Center, views the space shuttle Endeavour’s payload bay during a tour and preview of the new Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center at the CSC on Friday, June 5, 2026, ahead of the announcement of the museum’s opening date. [Photo: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images] Rebuilding the Endeavour Assembling a complete, authentic Space Shuttle system displayed on its 20-story-tall launch configuration, was the result of a meticulous six-month mating process called “Go for Stack,” during which Endeavour was raised to a full stack height of 185 feet (56 meters) and joined to ET-94, the last remaining flight-qualified external tank