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also a renowned center for restoration and preservation of these artifacts. This activity has served to highlight inherent limitations in the facility, which dictate that it be replaced in the coming years. First, most of these temporary buildings are far beyond their useful economic lifespan. Second, and perhaps most important, airplanes and spacecraft are no longer able to be brought to the facility because of the build-up of the surrounding area; highway overpasses and other new construction limit the size of artifacts which can be transported through the streets. This difficulty has been made more acute by the growth in size of air and space craft and in their complexity. (No longer can an aircraft be broken down by simply detaching the wings from the fuselage; instead, the integral construction of many modern aircraft and all spacecraft makes non-destructive disassembly impossible.)

There is an increasingly urgent need to anticipate the collection of the vitally significant air and space craft of the present time. No one can ignore the interest in the Space Shuttle Enterprise, which is scheduled to become a part of NASM's collection, possibly as early as 1986. In a similar vein, the Concorde supersonic transport, perhaps the most controversial of all transport aircraft, is expected to become available to the Museum in 1987. The visitor and the scholar in the year 2083 will be as fascinated by these magnificent vehicles as the visitor and scholar of 1983 is with the Wright Flyer or the Apollo 11. A new facility is needed to permit the NASM to bring in from desert storage some of the most significant aircraft of all time such as the Boeing 707 prototype, a Boeing B-27 Flying Fortress, as well as other important civil and military aircraft.