Inmates send shuttle replica to N.H.

THOMASTON – Displayed among model boats, wooden furniture and knickknacks at the Maine State Prison showroom was a one-of-a-kind item with a prized place in the window.

The scale model of the space shuttle Challenger – six feet long and nearly four feet wide – was handmade from strips of basswood with painstaking attention to detail, down to the outline of individual heat-resistant tiles.

The model was removed from its perch Thursday for delivery to the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord, N.H, where it will hang in the lobby.

“I’m completely delighted,” said Jeanne Gerulskis, the planetarium’s executive director. “You can tell people all you want about the Challenger. But seeing it in three dimensions really makes it come alive.”

Planetarium officials put in a request for the model after seeing a smaller version of the Challenger created at the prison.

The first model was commissioned at the behest of Ray Griffin, administrator for the McAuliffe-Challenger Center at Framingham State College in the town of McAuliffe’s birth in Massachusetts.

McAuliffe, a New Hampshire teacher who was supposed to be the first U.S. educator to travel in space, died along with six other crew members when the Challenger exploded after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986.

Griffin got the idea for the model after passing the prison shop while driving along U.S. Route 1. He stopped to take a look, and when he saw the handcrafted items sold at the store, he started to wonder if he could place a special order.

“I thought, ‘If these men have the skills to do that kind of detail on a model of a three-masted schooner, I’ll bet they could create a model of the Challenger,”‘ he said. Prison officials refused his request, saying their shop didn’t take commissions. They eventually relented and asked inmate Rod Whitten if he would take on the challenge.

Whitten, 37, initially decided the assignment was too difficult. But he decided to think about it over the weekend – the same weekend that the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere over Texas.

He didn’t necessarily view the second shuttle tragedy as an omen. But, he said, “I thought maybe I should try.”

Whitten’s grandfather in Tennessee taught him to carve wood. But he didn’t hone his skills until he landed in the Maine State Prison in 1994, where he is serving a 25-year sentence for domestic assault.

He is one of 130 inmates who earn between $1 and $2.50 per hour for their work in the prison’s wood shop. The shop, which pays for itself with sales of furniture and collectibles, brings in about $1.5 million a year.

“There’s a sense of pride in creating something that not only I love, but other people enjoy,” Whitten said during an interview at the Maine State Prison in Warren. “Whatever I do for work, I will be a wood carver the rest of my life.”

He spent about 300 hours on each of his previous shuttle models, and now he is working on an even bigger project.

His next model will feature the Challenger on the launch pad, attached to its orange fuel tank and two solid-fuel rocket boosters. It will stand nearly nine feet tall and weigh more than 500 pounds.

Whitten says he hopes to one day see his models in the settings in which they were meant to stand.

“I think that’s when it will probably hit me,” he said. “It’s one thing to create something but it’s another to see it in its intended place.”