Viewing page 34 of 119

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

-17-

THE NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM EXTENSION WITH A GLOBAL VIEW

[[underlined]]1. Introduction[[/underlined]]

The National Air and Space Museum was brought into life by a Congressional mandate to "collect, preserve, and display aeronautical and space flight equipment of historical interest and significance." This the Museum has diligently done, amassing the most important collection of air and spacecraft in the world, and in the process attracting millions of visitors every year. However, as it approaches the final decade of the 20th Century, the Museum sees its ability to carry out this mandate increasingly threatened.

Three major problems now jeopardize the future of the National Air and Space Museum. First, neither the Museum on the Mall nor its Paul E. Garber Facility in Suitland, Maryland, have sufficient space to house or exhibit the artifacts already in, or soon to be added to, the collection. Many important airplanes are stored in pieces at the Garber Facility and cannot be assembled there. Others are stored in the Arizona desert because there is no room to exhibit or house them in Washington.

Second, it is virtually impossible to transport very large air and spacecraft either to the Museum on the Mall or to the Garber Facility. For example, there is no way to transport to either location the Space Shuttle Orbiter [[underlined]]Enterprise[[/underlined]] or the Concorde which has been promised by Air France. Very large artifacts cannot readily be moved by road, because obstacles such as overpasses would require their laborious and sometimes destructive disassembly. Most such artifacts can be moved intact only by air.

Third, the physical integrity of 80 per cent of the National Collections, housed at the Garber Facility, is threatened by the deteriorating condition of the overcrowded warehouses and the lack of proper environmental controls.

When the Museum opened on the Mall in 1976, it was already recognized that an Extension would eventually be needed if the Museum were to keep pace with developments in aerospace technology. In 1981, the Museum conducted a survey of sites with access to a runway located within one hour by car from the Mall. The prime candidate sites were the Dallas and Baltimore Washington International Airports. In January 1984, the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution approved submission of the request for project authorization to Congress. Legislation was introduced but not passed.

More recently, it was recognized that an Extension, in addition to providing adequate facilities for the exhibition and preservation of a growing collection of air and spacecraft, would also offer an opportunity to develop exhibits on the social impact of aviation and on global environmental systems particularly as studied by airplanes and spacecraft. Many of these exhibits would make use of sophisticated computer interactive technology.

The Extension would house, preserve, restore, and exhibit the larger airplanes and spacecraft. Those are the machines which typically have had the greatest social impact, in contrast to the earlier, smaller ones which, to a large extent, were innovative or developmental precursors to what followed.