July 2019 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum wants to conserve, digitize, and display the spacesuit Neil Armstrong wore on the mission, right down to the lunar dust on the material. That shouldn't be a problem for the D.C. institution, right? No so fast. The Smithsonian ostensibly doesn't have the money to do it. So it is resorting to a $500,000 Kickstarter campaign.
The Smithsonian Institution, a federally funded complex of museums and research centers, has a budget of $819.5 million for the fiscal year of 2015. This covers 64 percent of the museum's efforts; the rest comes from private donations. The team behind the project says that while “federal appropriations provide the foundation of the Smithsonian's operating budget and support core functions, such as building operations and maintenance, research, and safeguarding the collections,” they aren't enough to fund Reboot the Suit, as the project is called. This is the first of a number of Kickstarter projects the institution will launch, Kickstarter announced in a press release.
Alison Mitchell, a public affairs specialist at the National Air and Space Museum, says the institution decided to Kickstart to speed up the fundraising process. Private donations take months to raise, and the museum wants to have the suit on display in time for its big anniversary. While federal funds cover basic conservation efforts, she says, Reboot the Suit is a special case, though it is unclear why.
The museum hopes to build a display case to replicate the climate- and humidity-controlled storage unit that spacesuit is in now, as well as protect the suit from light, which can cause deterioration. The project's team estimates that this alone will cost $100,000. The preservation efforts will also make it possible for curators to display the suit for the first time since 2006, and 3-D scanning will let people view and study the suit online, from anywhere in the world.
So why Kickstarter? For one thing, the museum has a history of mismanaging funds and has previously resorted to raising private donations to digitize its collection. The Smithsonian's decision to crowdfund might also be a marketing effort to reach a broader audience, rather than an act of desperation. Mitchell acknowledges that the campaign could flop, in which case Armstrong's suit would stay safely tucked away in storage, where it lives now.
