A provision in President Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" orders the Air and Space Museum to transfer ownership of Space Shuttle Discovery back to NASA for relocation near the space center in Houston.
The Smithsonian Institution is not backing down on its stance that Congress has no legal authority to mandate Discovery's removal, and they're bringing the receipts.
It all started with the "Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act." Introduced by Texas Senators John Cornyn (R) and Ted Cruz (R) in April, this act was an attempt to force the transfer of Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center just outside Washington D.C. to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The act stalled in committee and would have been dead in the water, but was rebranded and folded into the more than 1,100 pages of President Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" in an attempt to force the issue.
While the language of the legislation was altered to comply with Senate reconciliation rules, such as refraining to name Discovery directly, the goal remained the same. The new wording instead refers to the transfer of a "space vehicle" — to be specified by the NASA Administrator within one month of the bill's signing — to a NASA facility "involved in the administration of the Commercial Crew Program" by January 2027. The Smithsonian has rejected the attempt outright, saying it has the paperwork to prove the Institution's ownership of Discovery and that it's critical the space shuttle remains in its care.
In a formal response, the Smithsonian Institution says: "it owns Discovery, which, like the rest of its collection, is held in trust for the American public. The Smithsonian asserts that NASA transferred "all rights, title, interest and ownership" of the shuttle to the Institution in 2012, and that it is "part of the National Air and Space Museum's mission and core function as a research facility and the repository of the national air and space collection."
The Smithsonian was awarded the privilege of providing Discovery's retirement home in 2011, when NASA announced the fates of all the decommissioned space shuttles. During the Senate appropriations committee's full committee markup hearing on Trump's Big Bill July 10, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin (D) proposed an amendment titled "Houston, We Have a Problem," saying, "one of the states that lost in that competition 12 years ago has come up with a new idea: Let's do it over again and make sure Texas wins."
"This is not a transfer," Durbin said, "it's a heist — a heist by Texas because they lost the competition 12 years ago." After expressively iterating his concerns about the issue, Durbin withdrew his amendment, but suggested his colleagues "be honest" about it going forward.