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It is a concededly legitimate question whether these large craft might be adequately represented for future generations by merely recording their passing by means of photographs, drawings, and models. No museum, after all, can collect everything. No museum has undertaken to collect steel mills or ocean liners. But unlike these latter examples, it is well within the capability of our technology to store and exhibit airplanes and space-craft of any size known or contemplated today. Without a continuing flow of newer artifacts the present collection becomes truncated at an arbitrary point in time and will gradually lose a considerable part of its present, unique significance.

The NASA/Smithsonian Artifact Transfer Agreement establishes the Air and Space Museum as the repository and guardian of the historic material objects of America's civilian space program. The Museum is thus responsible to this and future generations as a major source of actual space age artifacts the public can view. By remaining the sole authorized guardians of these objects (while maintaining a fair and effective loan program) the Museum prevents commercial or other destructive exploitation of this material heritage and assures the dissemination of that heritage to the public.

But beyond the considerations just mentioned is an even weightier one: the transcendent importance of the field of human endeavor represented at the National Air and Space Museum. It can well be argued that the unquestioned leadership this country has given to the conquest of air and space is likely to stand in the light of history as our most profound and enduring scientific or technological contribution to mankind. For this reason, it would be tragically shortsighted to foreclose further collection efforts on the purely expedient grounds that further housing for collections is not available. We have an obligation, in other words, to take deliberate steps directed toward overcoming this shortage as soon as conditions permit.

Only an extension, as now proposed, will allow the Museum to proceed with its mission of collecting and exhibiting air and space equipment of historical significance without an artificial restriction on size. But while the need for an extension from this viewpoint alone is great, the ability to store and exhibit large artifacts is only one of the supportive considerations. The new facility also will need to display a character of its own, to be attractive and important in its own right.

For the new themes suggested earlier to be properly treated an extended effort at planning that takes a museum-wide approach needs to begin soon. This planning process should comprehensively consider the location and scheduling of construction of new facilities, the utilization or disposal of facilities whose present contents or activities will be relocated, the magnitude and sources of the funds that will be needed for their operation and maintenance as well as construction, and projections of the flows of visitors to be anticipated.

Fundamental to such a planning effort is a detailed, substantive consideration of the new configuration of Museum programs that will result. This must embrace future allocation of activities in the present Museum as well as in the extension. Suitable accommodations need to be found for an enhanced program of scholarly research. Allowance needs to be made, too,