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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

Spare parts for the Apollo Lunar Module get auctioned too. NASA apparently just sold the lot when they shut down the Apollo program. Put it in a museum? Nah, we can totally get a fiver for this thing.

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I work in aerospace industry now. Trust me, the amount of hardware stored for decades ongoing projects is shocking. Storages are full, basements are full. Labs and offices slowly turn to storages too. Once you throw it away, there is no way to buy a replacement. So if one can get rid of parts for some finished/discontinued project everything gets disposed asap.

Reinstating the pipework caused the first major headache; most parts had been discarded and engineers had to scour scrap yards and museums to find them. One vital piece was discovered being used as an ashtray.

https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/9664538.the-falklands-raid-...

There are no better souvenirs than those! I have a part of a helicopter tail rotor as a very decorativr paper weight, titanium part sure look sexy if you ask me!

>Labs and offices slowly turn to storages too.

There may or may not be six pelican cases full of junk, I mean totally useful equipment, next to me in my office right now.

Nobody cares about spare parts in a museum unless they add up to a full replica of something recognizable. Selling to people who care is likely much better in the long term.

If they turn out to be valuable our grandkids can read about how someone donated them from their private collection.

Which is why 5000 year old shards of pottery dug up at some site displayed in a museum are so boring. Having the full thing (even a non-original mock up) with the authentic pieces presented as an exploded view of the individual parts would be more interesting.

There are entire Concordes on display.

My cousin worked on the Apollo 13 movie in the prop department. All that extra hardware made his life much easier. He said they didn’t really track what happened to non-flown equipment. A couple things from the Smithsonian had guards.

This is what I like about USA. History? Who gives a damn. ;)

(I don't mean it in a demeaning way. It is just an observation and I think it has some advantages, too, if you do not preserve every building there is for example.)

I believe people in the US care about history, but it's around the person, legend, myth, not around objects.

Firearm auctions are pretty common. High bids are definitely often about person/legend/myth, like being at a famous battle, but many others are pretty much just the gun. I think that's because they're relatively common, affordable, usable, and easy to preserve. There's one Girl with a Pearl Earring made of canvas but millions of wood and metal Lee-Enfield rifles.

Cars seem like they'd be similar but I don't know any car collectors. I've also heard of antique furniture auctions, very curious what those collectors are like.

"History? Who gives a damn" has been the default behavior of humanity until very recently

You could probably say the same about almost any criticism of a modern country.

Not preserving buildings is typically developers thinking their new shiny would be better (mainly because they get paid for it) are always keen to getting rid of the existing building. If the building is lost to a fire, probably an insurance thing. It gets really intriguing when a building owner really really wants a new building but the existing vacant building has been marked historic and cannot be demolished suddenly is lost in a fire.

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