Bonne Terre, MO — The Bonne Terre Space Museum is slowly making progress on its annex in the Heritage Hall Building.
Space Museum Owner Earl Mullins said when they started out, the annex space was in really rough shape. It was what used to be the city hall in Bonne Terre years ago.
“Currently we are refinishing and rehabbing the walls, it’s about 5,000 square feet of space,” said Mullins. “The building itself is extremely sound and it is a wonderful building, but it has been allowed to kind of deteriorate inside.
“The annex will allow us to have more space to where we can have special programs for the kids after school. We will have maybe a one or two hour-program for them every other month or once a quarter or something like that.”
Mullins said they have a ton of other stuff in storage that they have received from NASA and other parts of their collection that they will be able to get out. He added that they are going to have a lot of interactive stuff in there.
Hopefully if things continue the way they are going right now, they should have the annex ready to go by late summer or early fall.
“We could use some help from the public. We have about a $30,000 shortfall and everything is 100 percent volunteer work,” said Mullins. “Basically all we are doing is paying for materials and we are doing a phenomenal job with very little money.
“Our two main expenses are going to be air conditioning and flooring. If somebody out there could help us out with that, we are looking at about $30,000 for that and we don’t expect it to all come from one place. If there is an air conditioning company that could help, we would really appreciate it.”
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