If y’all had come to Space Center Houston, they’d have built a home for a retired space shuttle there. Well, maybe. Today’s report of the NASA inspector general points out a few details in the story of how Houston lost out in the retired-space-shuttle home sweepstakes. At a presentation given to NASA administrator Charles Bolden in November 2009, 4 out of 5 options being considered at the time by the agency’s recommendation team would have given Houston a shuttle. And Bolden says Houston was a sentimental favorite for him, too. He told investigators
that if it had been strictly a personal decision, his preference would have been to place an Orbiter in Houston. He noted that “[a]s a resident of Texas and a person who . . . spent the middle of my Marine Corps career in Houston, I would have loved to have placed an Orbiter in Houston.â€
So what happened?
The New Braunfels city council is scheduled to vote this evening on an ordinance that would 
The esplanade and corner food trucks will be gone, the parade will be “de-emphasized,” and the police will be active at the next Lights in the Heights, according to a Woodland Heights Civic Association email received by Martin Hajovsky. According to some estimates, 50,000 people attended last year’s annual Christmas-y event. 
On the agenda for the next meeting of GRACE, the homeownership organization in charge of The Oaks housing development at 4300 Broadway in Galveston: A discussion of Earl Jones’s sculpture of former world heavyweight boxing champion and Galveston native Jack Johnson, carved out of the trunk of a subdivision oak tree killed by Hurricane Ike. Homeowners association President Frank Rivera has been campaigning to have the stature moved. His complaint: That the Johnson statue was bringing a stream of tourists and other visitors to the neighborhood, creating traffic and disrupting the peace. 
Former Space Shuttle manager Wayne Hale sees the writing on the wall: “Thousands of high paid, white collar jobs are leaving the Clear Lake area as NASA and JSC wind down. The City of Houston and the State of Texas have done, well, next to nothing. Nobody gets excited; nobody tries to bring new work here, a little lip service, no real effort.
Nope, Houston does not deserve an orbiter because Houston doesn’t care.
Don’t expect JSC and its mission control to be here forever just because we are entitled to them.
No, with the level of interest that our citizens and leaders have in JSC, I soon expect to see that facility in the hands of a different federal agency. 
