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The perfect Christmas gift for the space buff

Three space shuttles, slightly worn, 20m miles on the clock between them, one not-so-careful owner. Yours at a knockdown price of $42m each, post and packing not included. At last, the perfect Christmas gift for the space buff who has everything.

NASA plans to sell off its remaining shuttle fleet — Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, which between them have flown 86 missions since 1984 — when the programme is grounded, to raise funds for the cash-strapped agency. But wealthy wannabe astronauts will be disappointed: their main engines will be removed before the sale, rendering them astronautically defunct. The advertised price is just the starting figure, and includes the minimum $6m cost of stripping each shuttle of hazardous materials and flying it to an airport of the buyer’s choosing. NASA is facing a budget deficit for its next-generation Ares rockets, which it hopes will return astronauts to the moon from 2015.

Despite its eagerness to sell, the agency is approaching only educational institutions and science museums, to assess the size of their chequebooks. Only U.S. citizens will be eligible to buy, and must promise to display the spacecraft in a climate-controlled, indoor location.

The six main engines from the last three shuttles will be sold separately for up to $800,000 each. Columbia and Challenger, the first two craft to fly, were destroyed in 2003 and 1986 respectively, with the loss of 14 lives.

The last shuttle mission is scheduled for September 2010. Barack Obama has appointed a team to assess the viability of extending shuttle flights beyond that date, to close the gap until the planned first manned flight of the new Orion crew capsule and Ares rocket in 2015.

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