The tussle on Capitol Hill over the space shuttle Enterprise continued on Tuesday with a senator from Ohio demanding that NASA rescind its award to New York City.  Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, sent a letter to Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, asking him to reconsider his decision to give Enterprise to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan.  Mr. Brown cited the Intrepid’s plan — first reported in The New York Times — to place the shuttle in a new building across the West Side Highway from the aircraft carrier that houses the museum.  The museum uses the property as a parking lot but does not own it. The lot, which is designated for manufacturing uses, would have to be rezoned.  “If the Intrepid museum’s plan was to build a new facility in an area of New York that it does not currently have permission to build on, that should have been made clear to NASA from the start,” Mr. Brown said. “This report makes it evident that New York City was, and still is, woefully unprepared to house the Enterprise space shuttle. This also raises further questions about the thoroughness of NASA’s selection process — and I urge NASA to revisit its decision to send the Enterprise to New York.”  General Bolden announced in April that the three remaining shuttles that have flown in space — Atlantis, Endeavour and Discovery — would go to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the California Science Center in Los Angeles and the National Air and Space Museum annex in Virginia. Enterprise, which is a prototype for the orbiters and is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum, would then be transported to New York City.  NASA gave Intrepid officials until Jan. 12 to pay $8.3 million to cover the costs of the move.  As he has done for months, Mr. Brown made a pitch in his letter for an unsuccessful bidder from Ohio, the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton. “They are ready today to accept a shuttle,” he wrote.  The senator’s letter did not address the financial obstacle cited in a report issued in August by NASA’s inspector general. That report, which reviewed the award process, revealed that, in April, officials of the Air Force museum had told NASA that they did not believe they could raise the $28.8 million the agency was asking for a shuttle that had gone into space.  The report said that NASA staffers made an error in scoring the proposals that shortchanged the Air Force museum. Absent that mistake, the Air Force museum would have received the same score as the Intrepid, the report said. But General Bolden told investigators that he still would have chosen the Intrepid.  Mr. Brown’s plea follows calls for a recount from other districts, including Seattle and the Houston area. Elected officials in Texas have been decrying the denial of a shuttle to the Space Center Houston since April, a disappointment that was stoked again by news of the Intrepid’s changing plan for displaying the shuttle.  In late September, Douglas R. King, the chief executive of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, met with NASA officials to argue that evaluators gave his museum too few points for its annual attendance and the number of foreign visitors to the city and gave the Intrepid too much credit for its readiness to accept a shuttle. The Museum of Flight spent more than $10 million on a building that was intended to house a shuttle, a spokesman for the museum said.  An Ohio businessman jumped on the take-back-the-Enterprise bandwagon late last month with a petition on the Web site of the White House that asks President Obama to revisit the choice of Manhattan over Dayton.  So far, NASA officials have not been swayed.
News that the Manhattan museum was changing how it would display the shuttle, gave an opening to advocates for other institutions that want it, including the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force outside of Dayton.