Dayton museum gets space shuttle trainer

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — It wasn’t a space shuttle, but the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force got the next best thing.

A space shuttle crew compartment trainer arrived at the museum near Dayton aboard a cargo plane Wednesday. It’s a mock-up of the shuttle nose and cockpit that trained hundreds of astronauts for space.

The Dayton Daily News reports that over the next year, the museum will build a mock-up of a payload bay and a tail section. A new $48 million hangar will be built in 2014 to house the 23,000-pound artifact.

The three retired shuttles went to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the California Science Center in Los Angeles, and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.