History
HOW IT BEGAN ...
The Space Shuttle Café that you
see today is a reincarnated DC3.
The aircraft rolled off the Douglas Co. production line in March 1944 and flew in World War II. After the war, All American Airlines (which later became Allegheny Airlines) bought the plane. A hijacking to Cuba is part of the plane's lore. Argonaut Airways was the last commercial airline to own this DC3 before it was retired in mid-1970.
A Californian named H.L. “Smokey” Rolland rescued the old DC3 from the scrap pile and converted it into a motor home. The fuselage was trimmed and mounted onto a school bus frame. Smokey’s “Air V” was for the first street legal DC3 in California. It probably still is.
The next owners, Robert and Heike Pfeiffer, were inspired by the NASA space program and converted the vehicle to look like the Space Shuttle. They called it the Smile Shuttle. It appeared at public events and was an attraction in Europe during the mid-‘80s.
After it returned from Europe, the Smile Shuttle was stored in the desert east of Los Angeles.
It was here that the shuttle was re-discovered by an Oxnard, California, couple. The shuttle was exactly the type of food-service vehicle that Phil and Becky Petersen had been looking to buy.
It took four years of planning and labor in their workshop, but the Petersens have converted the retired DC-3 into a full-service commercial kitchen that has stardom written all over it. They have renamed it the "SPACE SHUTTLE CAFE."
