Atlantis Space Shuttle exhibit
— the orbiter, payload doors open, frozen in the climb.
Not only on a wall.
Atlantis Space Shuttle exhibit, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The orbiter hangs at a thirty-degree pitch, payload bay doors open, robotic arm extended, the way it looked on orbit. It is the real ship — Atlantis, thirty-three missions, twenty-six years, the last one to fly. The reveal room goes dark, the launch countdown ends, the curtain drops, and the room is suddenly full of spacecraft. People stop talking. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit opened on June 29, 2013 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Merritt Island, Florida, about an hour east of Orlando on the Space Coast. The 90,000-square-foot building was designed by PGAV Destinations and cost about 100 million dollars. Atlantis itself, OV-104, is displayed at a thirty-degree pitch with payload bay doors open and the Canadarm robotic arm extended, the first time a flown orbiter has been shown that way. It is one of only three surviving orbiters.
Atlantis flew thirty-three missions between October 1985 and July 2011, more than any other orbiter except Discovery. It carried the Magellan probe to Venus, Galileo on its way to Jupiter, and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory; it docked seven times with the Mir space station and eleven times with the International Space Station. Its final flight, STS-135, in July 2011, was also the final flight of the Space Shuttle program. It logged 125,935,769 miles and 4,848 orbits of Earth.
Admission to the Atlantis exhibit is included with general Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex admission, currently around 75 dollars for adults. The route in passes a full-scale external tank and solid rocket booster stack outside the building, then a pre-show film about the program's development, then the reveal room. Plan two to three hours inside the building; the complex itself is a full day. The exhibit also holds a Hubble Space Telescope mockup and the Shuttle Launch Experience simulator.
