The fundraising campaign to help preserve NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong's historic spacesuit has reached the halfway mark of its goal of $700,000, according to its organizer, the National Air and Space Museum (NASM).
The Smithsonian Institution announced that the Kickstarter crowdfunding project, which began on Monday, has already collected as much as $525,000 as of Saturday. The group said it was able to raise around $500,000 of it within the first five days of the campaign.
The prized spacesuit was worn by Armstrong when he and fellow NASA pioneer astronauts Michael Collins and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr. made their historic Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. The NASM launched the fundraiser to help sponsor its restoration efforts with the lunar spacesuit.
The NASM explained that Armstrong's spacesuit will be put on display temporarily in time for the 50th Moon landing anniversary in 2019. It will be then become the centerpiece of an exhibition, entitled Destination Moon, at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, DC which is set to open in 2020.
The new exhibition will be dedicated to the accomplishments of American astronauts during the 1960s, especially those that led to the eventually first landing on the Moon. The Armstrong gallery will focus on the astronaut's "one small step..." milestone in July of 1969, amid the economic and political tension between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
It will celebrate not only the triumph of the American people but also the achievement that resonated all over the world, according to the NASM.
"We want to preserve Armstrong's spacesuit - and the story it tells of its incredible journey - down to the particles of lunar dust that cling to its surface," the Smithsonian Institution wrote on its Kickstarter page.
"Just like the Apollo program, we will accomplish this in collaboration of thousands of people across the country and around the world."
For its next Kickstarter fundraiser, the NASM said that it plans to start a campaign for the restoration of the spacesuit worn by Alan Shepard, who is considered to be the first American astronaut to ever go to space. Shepard, along with fellow test pilots of the time Deke Slayton, Wally Schirra, Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, John Glenn and Gordon Cooper, were part of the Mercury Seven space project.
Mercury spacesuit will be preserved and digitized before being put on display on its special gallery. The NASM said that it will take its crowdfunding goal from $500,000 to $700,000 for its next project. As of writing, the campaign has raised over $550,000.
