ST. RE – Replica of the spaceship owned by a native of St. Cloud touched down here this weekend after a week-long trip from Florida to Minnesota.
The journey took the 25-tonne pipe on winding roads and often through small towns, as each country’s respective troops walked in front and behind the transport vehicle due to its massive size.
“Each state needs its own permits — and then you have to get them to coordinate with each other,” said Felicity-John Pederson, the ship’s owner. “There are so many things that can go wrong, so you’re very happy when each of them went right.”
The model ship, named Inspiration, passed through Minnesota just after midnight Saturday and arrived in St. Louis. Cloud a few hours later. On Monday, a crew at a local business began putting together a stand to store the ship while Pederson and others plan for its future.
“Our first job is to define what that is and then start pitching it to partners, maybe big companies here in Minnesota, especially if they’re involved in the aerospace industry,” Pederson said.
Pederson is a graduate of St. John’s High School. Cloud’s Apollo, which boasts a NASA training capsule on its campus. He is the founder of the LVX System, which has a patent for visible light communication – something he worked on with NASA. He and his wife, Irene, spend time in Florida and Minnesota.
In 2015, they took ownership of the full-size replica of the ship, which had fallen into a state of disrepair and was about to be destroyed, 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 ship can be permanently displayed in a large dome as part of a new Inspiration Space Port educational complex. that will also display other space vehicles, present speakers and exhibits related to space travel, and sell tickets for virtual tours of outer space.
NASA’s space shuttle program ended in 2011 with more than 130 missions completed. Two missions saw heartbreak: the shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry into the atmosphere and the Challenger disintegrated after liftoff, both incidents claiming the lives of seven crew members.
But other missions inspired awe for millions of people across the country, especially Gen X and Millennial kids who grew up with dreams of visiting space. DFL state Sen. Aric Putnam, a local supporter of the project, hopes to bring that joy and wonder to younger generations.
“I am excited by the opportunity to inspire our young people to be more ambitious and have big ideas, big hope,” he said.
Other ships that saw outer space are now on display on shore: Discovery is in Washington, DC, Atlantis is at the Kennedy Space Center, and Endeavor is in Los Angeles. Enterprise, a prototype orbiter that didn’t fly but paved the way for the shuttle program, is on display in New York. And another copy, called Independence, is on display atop a carrier plane in Houston.
Jim Banke, a Minnesota native and former aerospace journalist in Florida, said the replica of Pederson’s shuttle was built as a tourist attraction by the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in the early 1990s.
“This attraction opened outside the US Astronaut Hall of Fame. It was originally called ‘Shuttle to Tomorrow,’ and it was basically a theater where you would walk into the cargo bay and … put on these headphones and watch a movie ,” Banke said Monday.
After Pederson bought the shuttle model, it moved to the shuttle landing facility now used by the government agency Space Florida, which works with commercial space companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Last fall, Space Florida told Pederson it needed to move the shuttle as soon as possible to make way for commercial expansion — prompting Pederson to move the behemoth to his hometown. People can follow along with the effort on the Inspiration Space Port ISP Facebook page.
“I think this is a great opportunity for St. Cloud and all of Minnesota to have a model like this on display,” Banke said. “Even if it never flew in space, I guarantee it will live up to its name of ‘Inspiration’ to anyone who sees it and learns more about the space program.”