San Diego Air and Space Museum
Museum entrance, showing a Convair YF2Y-1 Seadart on the left and a Lockheed A-12 Blackbird on the right.
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| Established | 1963 |
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| Location | San Diego, California |
| Coordinates | 32°43′34.58″N 117°9′15.63″W / 32.7262722°N 117.1543417°W |
| Type | Aviation museum |
| Website | www |
San Diego Air & Space Museum (SDASM, formerly the San Diego Aerospace Museum) is an aviation and space exploration museum in San Diego, California, US. It is located in Balboa Park and is housed in the former Ford Building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
It contains many original and reproductions of historic aircraft and spacecraft, including:
SDASM promotes itself as one of the largest aviation museums in the nation, containing the third-largest collection of archives and library. SDASM has two restoration facilities, one on site, and the other located at Gillespie Field. The Gillespie Field Annex is open to the public with numerous aircraft on display outdoors, a Convair SM-65 Atlas ICBM, museum model shop, and a restoration shop. The museum's library contains an extensive collection of aircraft books and historic photographs of aircraft and aircraft manufacturing.
The museum was first opened to the public on February 15, 1963 in the Food and Beverage Building, which had been built in 1915 for the Panama–California Exposition. In 1965 the museum was moved to the larger Electrical Building.
On February 22, 1978 the Electrical Building and the Museum were destroyed in an arson fire. Several one-of-a-kind aircraft were destroyed, including the Beecraft Wee Bee, the world's lightest aircraft, and her sister craft the Queen Bee. A reproduction of the Spirit of St. Louis, built in 1967 by some of the same people who built the original, was also destroyed, along with more than 50 other aircraft, an extensive collection of artifacts and archives, and the International Aerospace Hall of Fame. Owen Clarke, the museum's executive director, said of the $4 million in losses, "This is unbelievably tragic. When you've spent that length of time acquiring history, building something up to where it had international prestige, then see it all disappear in a couple of hours, what else can it be?"
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