Challenger Scale Model Returns to Little Tokyo

In his busy shop in Hawthorne, Isao Hirai makes exact scale models of all kinds of things, from Wells Fargo stagecoaches to Mars Rovers. But the 77-year-old artist is best known locally for making the one-tenth-scale model of the Challenger space shuttle, which has been the centerpiece of a memorial in Little Tokyo for twenty-one years. The model returns to Astronaut Ellison S. Onizuka Street in downtown Los Angeles today after four months of restoration. Read more here in an LA Times article.