Author Topic: HiWorks proposal for Houston's Saturn V building  (Read 10473 times)

Offline Blackstar

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Re: HiWorks proposal for Houston's Saturn V building
« Reply #20 on: 10/09/2014 04:33 pm »
How many rich oil men are there in Texas and none of them wants to be a benefactor towards preserving a national artifact?  A proper enclosure should have happened years ago...

There is lots of money in the Houston area. But it takes a skilled fundraiser to tap it. The way to do it is to get a couple of famous Apollo astronauts on board and then walk them into some oil company HQs and ask for money. Play up the patriotism angle and all that. But if it was that easy, somebody would have done it already. You need a fundraiser who knows how to do that stuff and they are rare. Also, I suspect that part of the problem is that JSC is down in Clear Lake and not closer to the city itself. I don't think people in Houston think of Clear Lake as "Houston," and they would rather drive over to one of the museums in the city for a nice black tie event than head down 25, past the strip clubs and car dealerships, to Clear Lake.
Knowing this JSC had no reason crying that they didn't get an Orbiter...

Funny...this is the same argument that Dwayne Day made a few years ago in the aftermath of the Orbiter display selection controversy.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2127/1


Yeah, he did make that argument...

Because my work schedule has in the past several years taken me to a lot of NASA centers, and because I'm a history writer on the side and also like museums, I've had the opportunity to visit almost all the major air and space museums in the U.S. over the past four years or so, often multiple times. So I've been to the KSC, JSC, JPL and Huntsville museums. Also been to the one in Seattle, the Kansas Cosmosphere, the L.A. science museum with Endeavour, and the Air Force Museum (I was there again on Tuesday). (Add in the USS Midway and Hornet, and the San Diego Air and Space Museum. I have not been to the Intrepid, or Evergreen one.) I walk through them and make mental notes and often write articles for The Space Review on them.

The United States is lucky that it is a rich country and can spend money on preserving its aerospace heritage, and there are a lot of great examples of well-funded museums that have done a good job of that. Having compared a lot of them, Space Center Houston is not bad, but they were not exceptional. If you went to the KSC museum in 2008, just looking at the Saturn V center you could see what a great job they did and have a pretty good reason to believe that they would do an outstanding job with an orbiter. And of course the Smithsonian was going to get one. That left two (including Enterprise) and several bidders.

I think that from looking at the Air Force Museum and the L.A. Science Center at the time and comparing them to Space Center Houston, none of those facilities really stood out in terms of how they displayed their artifacts. (As I said, I haven't been to Intrepid.) The Air Force Museum has adopted a policy of displaying its planes in dark hangars with no natural light. And the L.A. Science Center really felt like a somewhat worn out kids' attraction. And when you walk through the front door at Space Center Houston usually the first thing you see is some traveling science exhibit for kids, and the first thing you hear is a bunch of screaming kids. And it is only after you look hard that you can find their space history artifacts, practically hidden away, not front and center.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there was nothing at Space Center Houston that made you say "Wow!" when you walked in the door, unlike the KSC museum (or the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center or Huntsville's Davidson Center, for that matter.). There was no sense that they valued their space history above all and went that extra mile to preserve and display it. And the same could be said for the Air Force Museum and the L.A. Science Center too. And so Space Center Houston then had to rely primarily upon the bid that they put together, and apparently their bid was worse than those other two. Maybe with the same bid, but a spectacular Saturn V display to show off they might have come out on top. But in the end they had neither.

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