Gallery: NASA’s shuttle-carrying 747 makes final journey to museum

If you happen to live southeast of Houston in Clear Lake, you probably already know that NASA is moving the enormous Shuttle Carrier Aircraft from Ellington Field to its permanent home at the Space Center Houston visitor complex. You can't help but know, the move is closing Texas State Highway 3 and NASA Road 1 for several nights this week. The Boeing 747-100, originally built in 1970 and purchased from American Airlines by NASA in 1974, has served America faithfully for four decades of ferry flights, and the big aircraft needs to be hauled across the city (in enormous pieces!) to become a permanent outdoor exhibit.

Engineers from Boeing's Aircraft On Ground team have spent the past month cutting up the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft outdoors at Ellington Field—something that the AOG folks have never before done. The disassembly required a great deal of planning and careful execution, because rather than simply being disassembled for scrap, the plan was to re-assemble the plane after its eight mile road trip. According to a representative from Boeing, this is the first time a 747 has been broken up outdoors, without help from a hangar, with the intent of piecing it back together again. The team noted that they needed to come up with a way to sever the enormous spar that bears the weight of the aircraft's wings (the "wing box spar," as it's called) so that the wings could be re-hung later.

Fortunately, the team didn't have to make the 747 actually airworthy after reassembly, but the rebuilt aircraft must able to hold up its own weight and withstand potential hurricane-force winds (the Texas Gulf Coast is no stranger to tropical hurricanes). The fuselage, wings, and empennage make up a convoy about a thousand feet long, which will crawl at about three miles per hour. Signposts, street lights, and utility poles along the route have already been removed where they would impinge on the aircraft as it passes.