ST. CLOUD — A replica of the space shuttle owned by a St. Cloud native landed this weekend after a weeklong journey from Florida to Minnesota.
The journey took the 25-ton hull over winding roads and often through small towns, while due to its enormous size, the respective police officers of each state drove in front of and behind the transport vehicle.
“Every state needs its own approvals – and then you have to get them to coordinate with each other,” said Felicity-John Pederson, the shuttle’s owner. “There are so many things that can go wrong and you’re just happy when everything goes well.”
The shuttle model, named Inspiration, crossed the Minnesota border shortly after midnight Saturday and arrived in St. Cloud a few hours later. On Monday, a crew from a local company began welding together a rack to store the shuttle while Pederson and others plan its future.
“Our first task is to define what this is and then present it to our partners, potentially large companies here in Minnesota, especially if they are in the aerospace industry,” Pederson said.
Pederson is a graduate of Apollo High School in St. Cloud, which has a NASA training capsule on its campus. He is the founder of LVX System, which holds a patent for visible light communications – something he worked on with NASA. He and his wife, Irene, spend time in both Florida and Minnesota.
In 2015, they took ownership of the full-scale shuttle replica, which was dilapidated and near destruction, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars restoring it.
“I think this is one of the coolest donations I’ve ever made in my life,” said Pederson, who hopes the shuttle can be permanently displayed in a large dome as part of a new “Inspiration Space Port” educational complex that will also display other spacecraft, host lectures and exhibits on space travel and sell tickets for virtual tours of space.
NASA’s Space Shuttle program ended in 2011 after more than 130 missions. Two missions were tragic: the shuttle Columbia was destroyed upon entering the atmosphere and the Challenger disintegrated after launch. Both incidents cost the lives of seven crew members.
But the other missions have awed millions of people across the country, especially the children of Generation X and Millennials who grew up dreaming of traveling to space. DFL State Senator Aric Putnam, a local supporter of the project, hopes to bring that joy and wonder to new generations.
“I am simply excited about the opportunity to inspire our young people to have more ambition, big ideas and big hopes,” he said.
The other shuttles that explored space can now be seen on shores: Discovery is in Washington, DC, Atlantis is at the Kennedy Space Center, and Endeavor is in Los Angeles. Enterprise, a prototype orbiter that never flew but paved the way for the shuttle program, is in New York. And another replica, Independence, is on a shuttle carrier aircraft in Houston.
Jim Banke, a Minnesota native and former aerospace journalist in Florida, said Pederson’s shuttle replica was built by the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex as a tourist attraction in the early 1990s.
“This attraction opened in front of the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame. It was originally called Shuttle to Tomorrow and was essentially a movie theater where you could go into the cargo hold and … put on these headphones and watch a movie,” Banke said Monday.
After Pederson acquired the shuttle model, it was taken to the Shuttle Landing Facility, which is now used by the government agency Space Florida, which works with commercial space companies such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Last fall, Space Florida told Pederson that he needed to move the shuttle as soon as possible to make room for commercial expansion — which prompted Pederson to move the behemoth to his hometown. People can follow the effort on the Inspiration Space Port ISP Facebook page.
“I think it’s a great opportunity for St. Cloud and all of Minnesota to display a shuttle model like this,” Banke said. “Even though it never flew into space, I guarantee it will live up to its name of ‘inspiration’ to anyone who sees it and learns more about the space program.”