Valerie Neal '71 gets space shuttle Discovery

NASA announced today - on the 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle launch - that it has selected the resting places of four retired spacecraft, and a Horned Frog is getting one.

The shuttle Discovery, which completed its last mission in March, will become the property of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, a wing of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Virginia, which is curated by TCU's own Valerie Neal '71.

The Udvar-Hazy Center currently holds the shuttle Enterprise, which was the first shuttle and never made it into orbit, yet has immense historical value. The TCU Magazine wrote about Neal, who has worked for NASA and has been at the museum as a curator since 1989. She is responsible for post-Apollo human spaceflight artifact collections.