Challenger

Challenger A newly restored one-tenth-scale model of the space shuttle Challenger returned Thursday to its Little Tokyo home of the last 21 years -– atop a memorial to Ellison Shoji Onizuka, the first Japanese American astronaut and one of seven astronauts who died when the shuttle exploded on Jan. 28, 1986.Quite a few of those who came out to Astronaut Ellison S. Onizuka Street to watch the model be hoisted back into place by a crane said this was the closest they would ever get to a space shuttle launch.


At 1 p.m., when the big moment was scheduled, people clutching cameras positioned themselves for the best views, lining the balcony of the Weller Court shopping center on one side of the monument as well as the roof and each level of the parking garage across the little pedestrian walkway on the other side.And some noted wryly, as the scheduled time came and went without any action, that the day now had the authentic feel of those big Cape Canaveral events.

The weather was not a factor here, though the long wait felt meltingly hot. But there were some other unexpected hitches in the model's return from its four-month overhaul at the Scale Model Co. in Hawthorne, where it was built in 1990Parts of the fresh paint job looked a little thickly applied, which required some last-minute scraping, said model maker Isao Hirai, the company's president, who showed up wearing a T-shirt that chronicled the history of the space shuttle program, listing each launch on the back as a rock band's T-shirt might list tour dates.

Challenger