The Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center is the third major museum to open in Los Angeles this year, and with its intense focus on the science and fascination of flight, it’s strikingly different from the other two. While the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art may be identified and defined by their sculptural architecture and eclectic offerings, the space center is distinguished by the singular presence of an actual space shuttle: the white, heat shield–clad Endeavour, which stands imposingly nose-up in launch position, embraced by two solid rocket boosters and attached to a massive, seemingly flight-ready orange fuel tank.

The scene is awesome: The Endeavour resides in its own enclosure, a conical, nearly 200-foot-tall gallery that soars out of the space center. The facility becomes the welcoming entry and paramount addition to the existing California Science Center in a now-cluttered Exposition Park, south of downtown Los Angeles. It’s a fitting home, commemorating the region’s long dominance in the development of the aerospace industry.

Space shuttle Endeavour in launch position in the Samuel Oshin Shuttle Gallery. Photo via the California Science Center.

Once inside, the visitor’s experience is made even more dramatic, first by being ushered into an entry hall to watch a short introductory film, a sharply edited montage of pre-launch scenes of the Endeavour’s final flight: astronauts entering the poised shuttle while its booster engines are ignited, all replete with rumbling sound effects. And then, as the screen goes dark, fabricated smoke seeps into the viewing area as you’re escorted a few steps farther into the lofty central gallery to behold the space-scarred vehicle itself.

Personally, I found the experience of seeing the shuttle to be deeply moving, evocative, and even unsettling, since the Endeavour (as visitors are informed) was the successor to the ill-fated Challenger, whose disastrous end I witnessed at the Houston Command Center 40 years ago. I was there on that fateful day of January 28, 1986, as the design critic of the Los Angeles Times, writing a story on the shuttle design as a space station for extended habitation, which was one of several experiential tasks that was to be performed on the Challenger mission. 

Invited into NASA’s amphitheater, I watched the Cape Canaveral, Florida, liftoff on two big television screens, to a chorus of cheers from the flight specialists at their work stations. About a minute into the flight, the vehicle exploded. There was an abrupt silence, then screams from the assemblage, as the capsule, in flaming pieces with tails of smoke, hurtled across the sky and into the sea, killing its seven-member crew.

The screams turned into sobs I still hear, along with the echo of the specialist I stood behind, who stared at a blank computer screen in front of him and repeated, in a cracked voice, “Do we have a downlink? Do we have a downlink?” (Tech talk for communication with the crew.) The phones started ringing, and I was abruptly escorted out of the center to the press room by a NASA employee, who was in tears, as I was.

I dutifully filed my story, “Cheers to Tears,” which ran on the front page of the next day’s Times with the banner headline “SPACE CENTER TRIUMPH TURNS TO TRAGEDY.” Emotionally drained by the scenes at NASA, I returned to Los Angeles, exhausted, feeling that design did not seem quite as important as it had before.

Jumping from rock to rock in a journalistic river, as a reporter, correspondent, and critic, one tends to put such experiences deep into memory. But the authenticity of the Oschin Space Center exhibit resonated with me. Designed by Oregon-based architectural firm ZGF, masterfully engineered by Arup, and meticulously built by Matt Construction, the lean, self-supporting steel lattice—think of a giant erector set in the form of a silo, creating a cavernous chamber—is, for all its complex fabrication, but a backdrop, a skeletal frame to showcase the looming shuttle and its booster rockets.

The effect focuses attention on the gleaming, brightly lit vehicle, while transporting visitors to another realm; the architecture is not an arresting labyrinth, but a modest organizing framework for experiencing various exhibits across three multilevel galleries. The clear and legible circulation is well served by large elevators that those in wheelchairs or pushing a baby stroller will surely welcome. (Finally, someone listened to museumgoers.)

After taking in the spacious spectacle, while looking more closely at the shuttle from the multiple viewing platforms circling it, I saw scattered space dross clinging to the bruised cladding. Along the way are an array of multiple touchscreen kiosks, which explain the prodigious detailing and incremental mechanics of the exposed shuttle. The Brooklyn-based firm Evidence Design created these engaging exhibits.

Additionally, if you have the patience to wait in line, there’s a glass elevator journey to view the open crew hatch, the flight deck with the commander and pilot seats and maze of controls, the open payload bay doors, and escape basket artifacts. For the more supple and brave, there is also a descent slide, which plunges visitors 45 feet vertically down a 115-foot long tubular steel slide. The experience is intensified, we’re told, by bright orange lights that flash to represent a body’s blood circulation as the shuttle pierces the atmosphere, while amplified booms emulate breaking the sound barrier on the return to Earth.

With all its immersive experiences, interactive exhibits, and hands-on artifacts, and of course the imposing Endeavour itself, the Oschin Gallery is the incontrovertible star attraction of the Air and Space Center, and the centerpiece of the 200,000-square-foot addition to the current 200,000-square-foot California Science Center. The new addition includes the Korean Air Aviation and Kent Kresa Space galleries (also designed by ZGF), which focus on the history of commercial and military flight and feature a variety of select historical aircraft, mock video flights, space artifacts, and interactive computer kiosks, all promising an engaging museum experience. (The galleries were not open when I toured the center.) Along with the Oschin, their public opening is scheduled for November 13—notably, with free admission.

Photos by @Mike Kelly, courtesy of ZGF Architects, unless otherwise noted.