The California Science Center traces its institutional history to 1912, when California established a State Exhibition building in Exposition Park to showcase the state's commercial and agricultural achievements. The facility evolved over the following decades, becoming the California Museum of Science and Industry in 1951, and was eventually renamed the California Science Center in 1998 following a major expansion and rebranding. Exposition Park itself — the campus that also holds the Natural History Museum, the BMO Stadium, and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — has been a hub of civic and educational life in South Los Angeles for more than a century.

In 1984, the California Museum of Science and Industry commissioned a new Aerospace Museum as part of the facility's expansion for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics. The architect was Frank Gehry. The building, which opened in time for the Games, was Gehry's first major public commission — a moment before his international reputation crystallized around the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Disney Concert Hall. The Aerospace Museum's design prefigured many of Gehry's later preoccupations: fragmented geometries, unexpected material combinations, a building that calls attention to itself as a building. An F-104 Starfighter jet was suspended from the exterior of the original design.

The space shuttle Endeavour was delivered to Los Angeles in October 2012 after NASA retired the shuttle fleet. The route from Los Angeles International Airport through residential and commercial streets required extraordinary logistics: dozens of utility poles along Manchester Avenue, Crenshaw Boulevard, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard were temporarily removed and reset over two days of slow-speed transport. The shuttle cleared obstacles by inches in some locations. An estimated 100,000 people lined the streets to watch. The procession took two days and generated the kind of collective civic experience that Los Angeles rarely organizes around a single moving object.

The California Science Center attracted 1.69 million visitors in 2022, making it the tenth most-visited museum in the United States that year. The current Endeavour display has been explicitly temporary: the $425 million Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center broke ground in June 2022, and building construction was completed in April 2026. The 200,000-square-foot addition is designed to display the orbiter vertically, mated to its external tank and solid rocket boosters, in the configuration it would have stood at launch — a presentation no other institution can match, as none retained the external tank and boosters. Exhibit installation continues as the center prepares to announce an opening date.