doubleofive said:

SilverWook said:

Which is really sad to think about. There was a time when a certain tv starship actually drew more visitors to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum than the real spacecraft on display. Imagine what a draw the Falcon could have been in some venue!
Really? Cause when I went to see that ship last year, it was in the basement of the giftshop with no signs that there was a basement to begin with. Had I not known exactly where to look, I wouldn't have known it was there at all. Broke my heart. That and the fact they gave it such an awful paint job.

I heard a rumor someone high up didn't like that people were coming to see it over the real historical craft on display. Hence it's banishment to the basement.

When I saw it in the 70's it was hanging in a gallery only a few feet away from a model of a real life Mars probe my father worked on when he was at JPL! Some of his co-workers there were among the first "Trekkies".

And yeah, the current restoration paint job is an abomination. I'm sad I've lost my personal 70's photos of the "E". (And the IDIC page which had tons of better photos than mine has vanished from the web.) The replacement red nacelle caps were wrong at the time, as was the missing deflector dish apparently replaced with a plastic salad bowl, but she was beautiful swaying slightly in the air conditioned breeze!

It's comforting that Lucasfilm seems to take really good care of their miniatures, and doesn't hock them off like Paramount did. I wonder if we will ever get to see the TNG Enterprise or the movie 1701 in a museum.