Space Shuttle Endeavour now stands upright in launch position at the new Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, which opened Oct. 28 as an expansion of the California Science Center in Exposition Park in Los Angeles. Gov. spoke at the opening in a fireside chat with Science Center President and CEO Jeffrey N. Rudolph, his office said.

The expansion adds roughly 200,000 square feet to the Science Center and gives Endeavour a permanent home in a vertical launch configuration with its external tank and twin solid rocket boosters. The governor's office said the installation has been described as the world's first and only authentic display of a space shuttle in launch position.

The building was completed through a public-private partnership with investments from the Newsom administration and the Legislature, the office said. The California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank, or IBank, issued tax-exempt bonds to the California Science Center Foundation in 2021 and 2025 for about $145 million and $62 million, and those proceeds helped pay for construction. IBank's first bond to the foundation, $82 million in 2006, financed the center's Howard F. Ahmanson Building.

Endeavour, the last space shuttle built, flew 25 missions after its first launch in 1992, helping build the International Space Station and servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA chose the Science Center as its permanent home ahead of its final mission in 2011. Every NASA shuttle was manufactured and assembled in Southern California, the governor's office noted.

Newsom used the event to promote the state's aerospace industry. His office said California is home to one-third of the nation's space technology companies, has more than 96,000 aerospace manufacturing jobs and receives about $3 billion a year in NASA science funding, the most of any state.

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Gavin Newsom

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