Apparently NASA was not getting enough bites out there for procuring the Shuttle Orbiters once they are retired. They have dropped the price from a cool $40M to $28.8M. I think we should follow the Russian’s lead on how to best utilize aging human spaceflight hardware. They made an ill-fated attempt at converting their Soviet-era Space Shuttle, Buran, into a restaurant / theme park attraction in the late 90’s that could easily be iterated on in order to generate success. I propose setting up a sports bar and grill in the Atlantis payload bay. We can refer to it as STS-400 and serve our signature drink: The Black Hole- where both time and money approach a singularity. It would be of only the highest quality since 50 people will inspect all ingredients for flaws for 90 days before pouring. Surely this would offset the high cost and long wait time for preparing such a masterpiece. And just wait until people savor the flavor of endulging upon a money-fired steak. All the mesquite taste in Texas would pale in comparison to a slab of meat prepared upon cindering $100 bills. I think we could even qualify for stimulus money as we will provide a seamless transition for out-of-work Shuttle engineers into the food industry; although they would have to get used to somewhat faster prep times than they are accustomed.

Surely we will be able to beat out lesser proposals from those stallworths- The Smithsonian, Kansas Cosmosphere and Pensacola Naval Air Station. All those in favor say aye!