Rocket piece finds a home

The chunk of an Air Force rocket that washed ashore on Hilton Head Island in May was headed for the scrap heap until a Beaufort County sheriff's captain suggested a new home: the Coastal Discovery Museum.

Capt. Toby McSwain helped retrieve the 12-foot by 20-foot piece of rocket fairing - used to reduce drag on a rocket - on the beach. He then called museum president and CEO Michael Marks with the idea that local schoolchildren might want to see it.

"How often do you have something of that magnitude wash up on shore?" McSwain said. "It was a pretty interesting piece." Marks then pondered whether the curved silvery metallic object with what looks like giant Lego parts on the inside would fit the museum's mission of explaining the natural history and cultural heritage of the Lowcountry.

Because museum officials thought it was the first time that part of a rocket has appeared on Hilton Head, they agreed to display it in an exhibit that will be unveiled at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

"We're looking at this as a modern-history event," Marks said.

Federal officials released the fairing to the museum after weeks of communication with the United Launch Alliance, a Denver-based joint venture of Lockheed Martin and the Boeing Co. that built the rocket and provides launch services to the U.S. government.

A few weeks ago, a truck with a sheriff's escort transported the part from Hilton Head's Fire and Rescue Training Center, where it had been stored, to an open-air shed on the museum's grounds at Honey Horn. Engineers from Florida removed electronics they didn't want on public display, Marks said.

Museum officials plan to install interpretive panels around the fairing before Tuesday's unveiling.

Inside the museum, they will show photos and a continuous video loop of the rocket's launch April 22. They also will display commemorative pins, coins and booklets about the rocket, which carried the orbital test vehicle for the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The orbital test vehicle the rocket carried aloft is a small, unmanned, space shuttle-like contraption. Specific details of its mission are classified, but the website space.com reports that the vehicle is a reusable robotic space plane on an experimental flight. "It's the first vehicle since NASA's space shuttles with the ability to return experiments to Earth for further inspection and analysis, Air Force officials said," according to the website.

It will stay in space for about 270 days before landing in California, alliance spokesman Michael Rein said.

About four minutes after the rocket launched, an explosive charge designed to discard the clamshell-like fairing ignited just before reaching outer space, said Rein, who is scheduled to speak at Tuesday's unveiling.

Alliance officials don't know exactly how part of the fairing wound up more than 550 miles from its drop zone northeast of San Salvador in the Bahamas.

It's designed to sink once it hits the water.

Rein speculated the size and shape of the piece that found its way to Hilton Head might have allowed it to catch an ocean current.

Other objects have reached land during the Atlas rocket program's 50-year history, but no similar incidents have occurred since the alliance formed in 2006, Rein said.

Alliance officials would've disposed of the debris had the museum not intervened, he said.

They are lending the object to museum officials for "as long as they would like to have it," he said.