Space Shuttle Delivery to Axe 400 Mature Trees | Katonah NY Real Estate

Those LA residents previously excited about the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s retirement at California Science Center, might today be a bit ticked off depending on their proximity to the streets of South L.A. and Inglewood.

Because the shuttle can neither be taken apart, airlifted by helicopter, or navigate the freeway due to overpasses (what engineer failed to take into account “shuttle delivery heights” for bridges?), it’s going to have to travel 13 miles of side streets to make it to the science center.

Unfortunately for residents living on those streets, 400 mature trees are going to have to come down to accomodate the shuttle’s massive size. For every tree that’s removed, the Science Center will plant two more, but that’s not comforting to some residents.

“They are cutting down these really big, majestic trees,” Lark Galloway-Gilliam, a longtime Leimert Park resident and neighborhood council director told the LA Times. “It will be beyond my lifetime before they will be tall like this again.”

Together with sidewalk improvements and the new tree plantings, the Science Center is expected to pay close to $500K to improve the city’s landscape.