Michael Collins looked down at his watch.
The Apollo 11 astronaut had already beaten the original schedule for the opening of the National Air and Space Museum by three days, but no one would remember that if these final 36 minutes didn’t go perfectly.
President Gerald Ford and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller took 35 seconds to find their seats on the red, white, and blue bunting-lined outdoor stage. The flyover by the Thunderbirds was quick enough. At any other event, it would have been the only time-dependent concern of the day.
Collins kept glancing at the time. The Presentation of Colors took 20 seconds.
The national anthem, performed by the Air Force Band, took about 85 seconds. Then came the invocation delivered by the Bishop of Washington, and then the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Dillion Ripley, welcomed everyone who had come out for the ceremony.
Warren Burger, Chief Justice of the United States and the chancellor of the Smithsonian, made short work of introducing the president. Ford then took to the podium at 11:13 am.
“This beautiful new museum and its exciting exhibits of the mastery of air and space is a perfect birthday present from the American people to themselves,” he said. “Although it is almost impolite to boast, perhaps we can say with patriotic pride that the flying machines we see here, from the Wright brothers’ 12-horsepower biplane to the latest space vehicle, were mostly ‘Made in USA’.”
Nine and a half minutes later, Ford concluded. “Thomas Jefferson said, ‘I like to dream of the future better than the history of the past.’ So did his friendly rival, John Adams, who wrote of his dream ‘…to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. You say it is impossible. If I should agree with you in this, I would still say, let us try the experiment.’”
“I can only add, let the experiment continue,” said Ford.
Red lights, green lights, snip!
Everyone on the stage then moved over to the entranceway of the new building, the “Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum,” as inscribed on a 12-foot-tall (4-meter) teal backdrop. Mounted atop the temporary wall were two sets of traffic lights, a pair of side-by-side green lights (currently off) and a set of red lights, now blinking.
Centered in front of the wall, about 11 feet (3.45 meters) away, was a small table draped in white cloth supporting a piece of NASA hardware. It may not have been clear to all of the ceremony’s guests and spectators, but mounted to a wood base sitting atop the table was the surface sampler arm from an engineering model of a Viking Mars lander.
A red, white, and blue ribbon was strung between the arm and the wall, passing through the center of the arm’s sampler end.
About 36 minutes earlier, NASA initiated a signal to the real Viking 1 probe—then 20 days from landing on Mars—which it then relayed back to Earth. At the distance separating the two planets that day, communications took about 18 minutes one way. The well-traveled command was then received by a tracking station and sent to the engineering arm sitting in front of the museum.
As Ford, Collins and Ripley looked up, the green lights blinked on, confirming the signal had been received.
“I was holding my breath,” said Collins in an interview decades later recalling his role as the first director of the National Air and Space Museum. “I was thinking about all those electrons going lost up there in space and all these VIPs standing around looking at this ribbon and this mechanical shearing device and nothing would happen.”
Part of the challenge was that the time of the opening kept changing. Originally, the museum was scheduled to open on July 4 as a birthday gift to the nation, but it was felt that it would compete with other bicentennial celebrations, and besides, the museum was ready to open.
Then there was the lander at Mars.
Viking 1 was supposed to land on July 4, but when it arrived in its certification orbit two weeks earlier, imagery of the primary landing site showed its terrain was too rough to guarantee a safe landing. NASA delayed the landing to July 20 as a more suitable landing site was sought.
So Collins was already dealing with date and time changes beyond his control.
“But believe it or not, all of the electrons did their cute little things and the ribbon got snipped and the building got opened. It was good,” he said.
The doors then opened, and the public got their first look at the Wright brothers’ 1903 Flyer, Charles Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis” and NASA space capsules, including the command module Columbia that Collins flew to the moon in 1969.
Of course, NASA and the Smithsonian were not going to allow a wayward signal to ruin the day. There was always a backup plan.
“We were prepared to cheat,” said Don Lopez, who was a member of the museum’s original staff and later its deputy director before his death in 2008. “We had a guy in the back with a button to push if it didn’t happen.”
A mystery 50 years in the making
With the ribbon cutting a success, contemporary reports suggest NASA packed up the sampler and took it back with them.
So what became of that arm?
Inside the museum on July 1, 1976, Viking was represented by a static model that had previously been in the US pavilion at the 1975 Paris Air Show and then was on display in the “Life in the Universe?” gallery.
It was not until a few years later (1979) that NASA donated the Viking that millions have since seen in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Gallery—the proof test article that was used on Earth during the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions to gauge the probes’ behavior and to test their responses to radio commands.
The same model had earlier been used to verify that the landers could survive the stresses they would encounter during launch and landing. It is therefore unlikely, though not impossible, that NASA removed the arm from the test article in 1976 to be used in a ceremony.
At least three other active arms were made. In addition to the two on Mars and one at the National Air and Space Museum, engineering models of the sampler are on display today at the Virginia Air and Space Science Center in Hampton (referred to as the science test/thermal effects article) and the California Science Center in Los Angeles (which is either the landers’ static or dynamic test model).
The last one was on exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida until 2019, when it was returned to NASA. Today, it’s believed to be at a planetarium in New Jersey.
Unfortunately, photographs and footage from the 1976 ceremony are not clear enough to read the serial or part numbers off the arm assembly, and no one at the museum seems to remember or know which model the arm came from (if any).
On Wednesday morning (July 1), before opening five newly renovated galleries to the public, the National Air and Space Museum will host a private ceremony to mark its 50th anniversary. The event will feature remarks by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and Amanda Wright Lane, the great-grandniece of Orville and Wilbur Wright.
The half-century celebration will not hinge on a signal from space. But perhaps on some future commemoration, the arm that opened it all can be identified and given its long-awaited due.
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