DISPLAYING a space shuttle is harder than it may seem – you can’t just plunk it down and set up the velvet rope. So, before the shuttle Endeavour (pictured below) can take up residence on its 1600-tonne concrete slab at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, there will be six months of prep.

While the other three shuttles are on show across the US in a horizontal position, Endeavour will be placed in a “ready-to-launch” vertical position, complete with the boosters and tank that would be needed to send it back up to space. Such a stack requires heavy hardware to keep it upright: six seismic isolators to protect it from earthquakes, huge studs made of specialised materials, and some of the strongest cranes out there to stack up the 61 metres of spacecraft.

The first parts lifted in were the aft skirts (one of which is shown in the main image, hanging from the crane), which are the base of the rocket boosters. Next are the boosters, then the enormous fuel tank and, finally, Endeavour itself. The roof of the building will then be built around the shuttle. It won’t be time to launch, but it sure will look like it.

UNDER launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida lies a trench. As rocket engines fire up for lift-off, it fills with streams of hot exhaust, safely diverting them at the expense of being scorched and scarred.

It was in 1967 that launch pad 39A became the premier spot from which to send humans into space, whether to the moon atop a colossal Saturn V rocket, or into low Earth orbit aboard the space shuttle.

When he looked at the layers of residue and engineers’ markings built up over nearly 50 years, Michael Soluri perceived a modern cave painting. “The engineers just saw ablated material – it was part of their job,” he says. “I saw something else. To me, it was all part of a magnificent mural made by man.”

The blue ovals (pictured above left) are residue from the main engines of the space shuttle launch vehicle, which used liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (pictured below).

The Saturn V rocket, on the other hand, used kerosene, which burned black. The most powerful rocket ever made, it left marks right up to the end of the fire trench, melting and peeling parts of its walls (pictured top right).

All those scars are now gone. In 2014, SpaceX signed a 20-year lease for launch pad 39A and replaced the trench’s walls and floor. Its new rockets will make their own marks.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Rocket graffiti”

YOU’RE standing in a colossal edifice, gawping upwards. Towering above your head are the 10 levels of platforms for working on rockets as they are built and readied for launch. One day this structure, the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will house the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft for , due to launch in 2018.

It is one of the largest buildings in the world, covering an area of some 32,000 square metres and boasts more than 3.6 million cubic metres of space inside. It was built to house the assembly of Apollo/Saturn vehicles, but it has since been modified to support space shuttle operations.

NASA has installed four new platforms to give access to SLS and Orion as they are constructed within the building before launch – how this would look is shown in the mock-up below.

While the first of Orion’s flights propelled by the SLS will be made with no people on board, Exploration Mission 1 will blaze a trail for future missions to Mars. Orion will perch atop the SLS, the most powerful rocket in the world, on its three-week mission into deep space. During that time it will travel thousands of kilometres beyond the moon, before returning to Earth hotter and faster than any spacecraft before.

The hope is that the ship could one day shuttle four astronauts on the first human mission to the Red Planet.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Inside a rocket factory”

You won’t find that in the gift shop. NASA is raiding retired space shuttles housed in museums for spare parts that could come in handy on the International Space Station (ISS).

The last shuttle flight was in 2011, and the four remaining shuttles were sent to museums around the US. This week, NASA engineers are removing four water storage tanks from the space shuttle Endeavour, housed at the in Los Angeles.

The tanks have a combined capacity of 300 litres, and were previously used to store water for the shuttle crew and also to refill water supplies on the ISS. In May NASA removed the tanks from the shuttle Atlantis, which is on display at the in Florida.

The shuttles were designed for many more missions than they actually flew, so the tanks are still in good working order and NASA hopes they could form part of a new water storage facility on the ISS. “Using the shuttle tanks could greatly reduce the overall cost to build the new system,” says NASA spokesman Daniel Huot.

But the tanks won’t be returning to space any time soon. “There is currently no timeline for when they would fly and the design details, certifications and deployment details for the project are still in development,” says Huot.

ESA’s spaceplane successfully completed its up-and-down mission (Image: ESA-S. Corvaja 2015)

Splashdown! The European Space Agency has completed a successful test flight of its Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV), a small spaceplane designed to test re-entry technology. Such vehicles could eventually help humans return safely from a deep space mission.

The IXV, an unmanned craft about the size of a small car, launched on top a Vega rocket from the Guiana Space Centre near Kourou, French Guiana at 1340 GMT today. It reached a height of about 400 kilometres as it flew most of the way around Earth before re-entering the atmosphere at 7.5 kilometres per second. It opened its parachutes and landed in the Pacific Ocean at 1519 GMT, about 100 minutes after launch.

Spacecraft experience intense heat because of friction as they re-enter the atmosphere, so they have to resist this heat if they are to land intact. Most re-entry vehicles are capsules like those used in NASA’s Apollo missions, which can’t control their descent.

The space shuttle, which landed like a plane, was an exception, but complications with its heat shield led to the death of seven astronauts as the Columbia broke up on returning to Earth in 2003.

Space hybrid

ESA’s IXV is a hybrid, shaped like the nose of the space shuttle and with rear flaps instead of wings to manoeuvre. “It’s a new type of body, taking the benefit of simplicity of a capsule and the capacity for manoeuvre of a winged vehicle,” said ESA director general Jean-Jacques Dordain.

A ship in the Pacific Ocean is recovering the IXV from the water and ESA scientists will now study the performance of their craft.

The Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle spaceplane was launched on a Vega rocket (Image: ESA-S. Corvaja 2015)

“It couldn’t have been better,” said Dordain. “But the mission itself is not yet over, as now it is going to be necessary to analyse all of the data collected throughout the flight.”

The agency has already started work on a new spacecraft called PRIDE (Programme for Reusable In-orbit Demonstrator for Europe). This would be a robotic spaceplane similar to the US’s classified X-37B, launching on a rocket and landing autonomously on a runway . PRIDE could service satellites in orbit or take pictures of Earth.

The ability to safely re-enter Earth’s atmosphere is crucial for returning samples from asteroids or other solar system bodies. ESA’s Rosetta probe, which is currently studying a comet, was before the mission was scaled down.

Eventually, ESA would like the ability to launch and return astronauts, because it currently relies on Russia to put humans into orbit. “There is no way Europe can put a man in something heading back to Earth without this technology,” IXV programme manager Giorgio Tumino told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ last year.

Living in space doesn’t come cheap. A report from NASA’s internal auditor, inspector general Paul Martin, says the space agency has . In particular, buying flights to the ISS from private companies rather than Russia is expected to increase costs.

Last week, NASA awarded contracts totalling $6.8 billion to Boeing and SpaceX, who will begin launching astronauts to the ISS on board private spacecraft in 2017. The agency currently buys rides on a Russian Soyuz craft for more than $70 million a seat, but is under pressure from US politicians to resume launches from US soil.

NASA expects its annual spend on the ISS to increase from $3 billion to $4 billion over the next 10 years, with the largest increase coming from transportation costs. Martin says these estimates are unrealistic, because NASA is using the Soyuz price as a baseline for private flights and is likely to have to pay Boeing and SpaceX more than it pays Russia.

It may also have to stump up for more un-crewed cargo missions to the station if international partners don’t maintain supply runs. The European Space Agency has already retired its cargo ships, and Japan and Russia have not yet committed to an extension past 2020.

Efforts to attract private research money to the ISS have also been unsuccessful. Martin thinks that private firms like pharmaceutical companies are put off by restrictions that grant the US government patent rights for any research done on the space station, and that NASA must push Congress harder for changes in legislation that would let firms retain their patents.