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well within the capability of our technology to preserve and exhibit airplanes and spacecraft of any size known or contemplated today. The public does not come to museums to see photographs and models, but to see the actual objects. Without objects, one may have a science center or a university, but not a museum.

The proposed Extension will allow the Museum to proceed with its mission of collecting and exhibiting air and space artifacts of historical significance without artificial restriction on size.

Large aircraft that belong in the collection, but are not now being sought because of space limitations, include the Boeing 707, Consolidated B-24 Liberator, Douglas DC-4, Boeing 727, and Fairchild F-27. Air and spacecraft now in the collection, but which cannot be exhibited at the Museum, include the Boeing 367-80 (prototype for the 707), Space Shuttle Enterprise, B-307 Stratoliner, Saturn V launch vehicle, Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, Sikorsky S-43 Flying Boat, and the B-29 Enola Gay.

The exhibition of these artifacts is only one reason for their collection. The artifacts provide vital historical evidence to illuminate events, issues, and methods in technological development and scientific research. When we preserve such objects, it is as evidence of the organization, rationale, and skill applied, and of the style, form, and aesthetics of an age. To save this evidence, and to exhibit it, is to remind us and those to come of what civilization at a certain time and place accomplished. Objects serve as potent reminders of what we once did and of how we came to succeed or to fail.

2.2 The Museum and Emerging Global Issues

The 20th Century has seen a revolutionary development that started with the first manned powered flight in 1903, and continued with Lindbergh's transatlantic solo flight in 1927, the Soviet Sputnik satellite of 1957, the first manned orbital flight in 1961, the first men landing on the Moon in 1969, and the launching of an armada of unmanned spacecraft to survey the entire solar system.

These are pivotal events, not so much because of the striking technological advances they reflect as for the impact they have had on our lives. A dozen years after the first tentative

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