Explore Endeavour with an astronaut who knows its secrets (including how to store tortillas in space)

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Set us as preferred Peer inside the open hatch of the space shuttle Endeavour, and you’ll see a few things: a ladder from the mid-deck to the flight deck (horizontal, since the orbiter is in vertical launch position); pads used to crawl into the hatch and prevent damage to its seal; and small patches of blue Velcro to secure pens, clipboards or procedural notes, so they don’t float away.Astronaut John Daniel “Danny” Olivas remembers his crews storing tortillas near the blue Velcro.There’s a cold plate there to keep the avionics system cool, and they’d stash the tortillas nearby so they’d stay fresher for longer (“We didn’t have a refrigerator on the space shuttle”).

Tortillas, as it turns out, have a long and storied history in space, first brought there in 1985 by payload specialist Rodolfo Neri Vela, the first Mexican astronaut.(Neri Vela requested that they be included in his food supply, and they solved the serious problem of floating crumbs.) There’s something fitting about the tortilla anecdote in multicultural L.A., home to the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center — the $450-million, 200,000-square-foot expansion to the California Science Center — which now houses Endeavour.

On Nov.13, when the center opens to the public, it will become the only place in the world to see a complete space shuttle system with an orbiter that has actually seen flight (25 missions).

That space shuttle system, or “shuttle stack,” includes the orbiter (the part of the shuttle that holds the crew and cargo); a solid rocket booster on either side; and an orange external fuel tank.The entire crew from the Endeavour’s last mission in 2011 plans to attend the center’s opening.Space shuttles (there have only been five in the U.S., plus one prototype) stand apart for myriad reasons, chief among them are the sheer n...