Bring NASA space shuttle to Seattle's Museum of Flight

THREE NASA space shuttles — priceless artifacts — will be lent or donated to museums in 2010, and The Museum of Flight will ask for one of them. The Seattle museum has a good chance and deserves full backing from members, donors and community leaders.

Already, the Museum of Flight has one of the finest aircraft collections in the United States, including a supersonic Concorde and an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. Its staff knows how to preserve and display rare aircraft and serves almost 500,000 visitors a year. The Museum of Flight also has done more than any U.S. air and space museum to teach and inspire students, said Director Bonnie Dunbar, Washington native and former astronaut.

The Museum of Flight is unusual among fully accredited air and space museums in that it is private and donor-supported. It would have to have a new building for the Shuttle, and Dunbar said the museum is prepared to have one custom-built.

Beyond all this are the personal connections. We have an air and space heritage here. It is Boeing, of course, and such hopeful enterprises as the old Rocket Research Corp. It is the University of Washington College of Engineering, which worked on the Shuttle's aerodynamics and the heat-absorbing tiles and graduated some of its engineers. In investor and philanthropist Paul Allen, we have the most famous sponsor of private spaceflight.

Humanity has a future in space. We are so used to thinking of this as a thing in the future that we forget that space travel now has a past — and one that should be preserved.

Here.