Visitors to the National Air and Space Museum don’t often get to see the work that goes on behind the scenes. This is especially true in terms of the labor that goes into collecting and caring for their artifacts. Many may wonder where all the air and space stuff (they call them artifacts) comes from. The answer is from a variety of places, including the United States Air Force, NASA, and the general public. These artifacts vary; some are large (aircraft and spacecraft) but many are relatively small (aircraft equipment or military or commercial airline uniforms and insignia, for example, or items of popular culture—air and space toys and games).
Museum stewardship demands that they manage their collections carefully. Part of their responsibility is to acquire material based on well-defined criteria and, in similar fashion, they occasionally choose to remove items from the collection (they call it deaccessioning). To help them sort out what to collect, what to keep, and what to remove, they have a collections rationale—a document that guides these decisions. It is a category-by-category justification of their collecting practices. The collections rationale takes into account such things as an object’s historical significance, rarity, and their ability to care for it. These are updated every five years or so. Periodic reviews of the collection, using the rationale as a guide, may indicate that an object or objects no longer fits the Museum’s collecting objectives and should be deaccessioned. This is a decision that goes through a careful process of review, with the aim of finding a home for the objects at another museum.
Since 2006 they have deaccessioned a number of large objects: a Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress went to the Mighty 8th Museum in Savannah, Georgia; a Boeing B-17D Flying Fortress “Swoose” went to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio; a Curtiss C-46F Commando went to the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, New York; a McDonnell KDD-1 Katydid Drone went to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon; a Grumman X-29 full-scale model went to the Cradle of Aviation Museum in East Garden City, New York; two 1/3-scale models of Mercury capsules went to the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamagordo, New Mexico, and the Penn-Harris Planetarium in Mishawaka, Indiana; a Vanguard I mockup went to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. We’ve also deaccessioned a number of smaller artifacts to museums and educational institutions.