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and facing worldwide resource constraints, are also assuming a prevailingly cooperative, international character.

Global interdependency is another theme that needs much fuller elucidation and heightened emphasis. Communications satellites link continents as well as nations ever more closely together, permitting dissemination of information at rates that were almost unimaginable until a very few years ago. Advances in remote sensing capabilities that have accompanied our leap into space offer unprecedented possibilities for looking back at our earth as a single giant ecosystem. Large-scale, ongoing processes that other bureaus of the Smithsonian have long been engaged in studying and monitoring, such as atmospheric and oceanic pollution, desertification, and the decline of bio-diversity as particularly reflected in tropical deforestation, can be understood and followed with strikingly enhanced clarity with radar imagery from shuttles and satellites. The picture of this as an endangered planet is so strikingly transformed when seen from space that the Smithsonian's communication to its public of a unified vision of the intersecting human and natural processes that are at work needs to become a prime responsibility of the National Air and Space Museum.

At the same time that the possibility of these important new vistas of understanding emerges, NASM is confronted by a critical shortage of exhibit and other facilities that threatens to cripple even its basic collecting program. Having brought together the most significant collection of air and space craft in the world during the forty-one years of its existence, it already lacks space to make significant further additions to its collections unless they are subjected to the highly destructive effects of indefinite external storage. Making matters still more critical is the fact that the large size and difficulty of disassembly of current air and space craft make it virtually impossible to move them from the airfield to which they are delivered to the present Museum building on the Mall or to the Museum storage facility at Silver Hill, Maryland. This absolute shortage of space exists even though the Museum has taken deliberate steps to limit the growth of the collection by carefully screening offers of donation, through deaccession of marginal items collected in the past, and through an extensive program of lending air and space craft to other museums in the U.S. and abroad.

Despite these efforts, the collection has continued to grow. At this time there are already a number of air and space craft that meet every criterion for inclusion in the collection but that cannot be viewed at NASM. For some, this is a simple matter of size. Aircraft that belong in the collection but are not now being sought due to storage limitations include the Lockheed SR-71, Vickers Viscount, and Boeing B-47. Air and space craft now in the collection that cannot be exhibited include the Boeing 367-80 (prototype for the 707), Vought F8U Crusader, Saturn V launch vehicle, Boeing Flying Fortress, Sikorsky S-43 Flying Boat, and B-29 Enola Gay. These are not simply oversized air or space craft. Each has ushered in a new era, a new system of transportation. While these craft can readily be seen in many places today, in fifty to one hundred years they will be seen only in museums where they will generate the same interest as the Ford Tri-Motor and DC-3 do today.