Apollo 11 relic

You've probably read that Amazon founder Bezos has located at least one of the Apollo 11 mission main booster engines and is talking with NASA about retrieving it(them). (NASA claims ownership of all of its spacecraft or parts thereof.) He wants to put it in a local museum. It has been under sea water for a long time, but he says they're made of tough stuff and it might be in good enough condition to display.

For some years the Louisville Science Center had one of the Apollo capsules (sealed) and a Gemini trainer you could climb into--they may still have the trainer but I didn't see it last time I was there. NASA needs to spread those sorts of things far and wide, where children can get their hands on them, and some of us can remember. They seem too bureaucratic and distant from where I sit. They provide wonderful space photos, no question about that, but I don't think they engage the kids enough with an "I can be part of that" feeling. Pretty much all of us would like to be "up there" but every astronaut needs hundreds of people who like to design and build cool things.

I wonder... I read that Newt, when he was Speaker, had a replica T-Rex skull in his office. A replica main engine booster is perhaps a little much (it is bigger than some offices I've worked in), but maybe scaled replicas? Building new is probably too dear for museums, and NASA is persistently short of money, so maybe not. Though if they reduced the number of bureaucrats to equal the number of engineers...

Somehow I missed this story: Liberty Bell 7 was retrieved. It was cleaned up (which took quite a while) and went on display in 2004. "As they were taking apart the Liberty Bell 7, the museum crew came across cigarette butts, a disposable plastic cup, a motel-sized bar of Dial soap and \$10.20 in cash. The cash included five \$1 silver certificates, some signed by members of the original assembly crew. The remaining \$5.20 was in Mercury dimes, with still-unidentified initials and symbols scratched into many of the coins."