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[i]The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC has always had a dual mission of both memorializing and educating. There is a natural tension between these two missions -- should the museum simply put an aircraft up on a pedestal and praise it, or should the aircraft be placed in a larger exhibit that explains the context that it was used in? The museum is filled with the icons of American spaceflight: Friendship 7, the Apollo 11 capsule, the X-15, SpaceShipOne. Perhaps it is time that it include examples of the failures of American spaceflight too -- wreckage from the Apollo 1, Challenger, and yes, even Columbia. After the Challenger accident, NASA buried the wreckage in a missile silo, as if it was hiding its mistake. The agency took a different approach with Columbia, using the debris in a forensics training program to teach others how to perform accident analysis. The agency has changed its approach to how it responds to these accidents, and maybe it is time for American society to change its approach as well. Context for such an exhibit would be important -- what is needed is not a memorial, but a tutorial. Rather than simply displaying the wreckage, the museum could display the wreckage in the context of the investigations themselves. Show the tagged and numbered portions of the Apollo 1 capsule. Show the enhanced launch photos of Columbia with the telltale smoke emerging from the side of the solid rocket booster. And show the sensor data recorder from Columbia that was recovered from the Texas mud and proved so important in reconstructing the final moments of Columbia's reentry.[/i]
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