San Diego Air and Space Museum

The building housing the San Diego Air and Space Museum was not built to be a museum. The Ford Motor Company erected it in nineteen thirty-five for the California Pacific International Exposition, spending over six hundred thousand dollars on a streamlined Moderne structure meant to showcase Ford's latest automobiles. After the Exposition closed, the building stayed in Balboa Park, cycling through uses until aviation enthusiasts claimed it.

The museum itself began modestly. It opened in nineteen sixty-three in a smaller Balboa Park building and spent its early years building a collection of historic aircraft. Then, on February twenty-second, nineteen seventy-eight, fire swept through the museum and destroyed almost everything. More than fifty aircraft were reduced to ash and twisted metal overnight. The loss was devastating, and what happened next defined the institution's character. Volunteers, donors, and aircraft restorers rallied. The collection was rebuilt from scratch, piece by piece, and by nineteen eighty the museum had reopened in the current Ford Building.

Today the museum holds one of the most significant aviation collections in the Western United States. The centerpiece is a flying replica of the Spirit of Saint Louis, the Ryan monoplane Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris in May of nineteen twenty-seven. San Diego built the original Spirit, and the connection to Lindbergh runs deep here. The collection also includes the actual Apollo Nine command module, which carried astronauts James McDivitt, David Scott, and Rusty Schweickart into Earth orbit in March of nineteen sixty-nine to test the lunar module for the first time. On the wall nearby hangs the only genuine GPS satellite on public display anywhere in the world.

In two thousand five the museum became affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. Admission remains affordable by design. The founders believed aviation history should be accessible to the kids who might one day make it.