Oregon Public Broadcasting

Officials at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville are pleased NASA has dropped the price of a retired space shuttle from about $40 million to $30 million.

But as Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, only three ships will be available and 20 museums are bidding.

Exactly when Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor will stop flying is unclear -- mainly because the Obama Administration isn't completely ready to rely on Russian space ships to get to the space station. But Evergreen Aviation Museum curator, Stewart Bailey, hopes to have a shuttle on display by 2012.

Steward Bailey: "We are pretty optimistic about the chances of getting an orbiter here. We wouldn't have gotten into it if we didn't believe we could get one."

To get to the front of the queue, Evergreen has already spent 10's of millions of dollars building a special hall for the shuttle.

The Smithsonian Museum normally gets all the space memorabilia from NASA, but the museum has said there is simply too much stuff for it to display from the shuttle era.