Michigan Space and Science Center

This section describes the "old" Michigan Space & Science Center, located on the grounds of Jackson Community College in Jackson, MI. The MSSC closed December 2003 and its building is now a "Community Events Center."

We first visited the MSSC in fall of 2002, with a return trip in 2003. After the museum's closing in 2003, Apollo 9 was moved, with reports of its arrival at the San Diego Aerospace Museum in May 2004 and its subsequent preparation for display several months later on collectSPACE. The Kalamazoo Air Zoo inherited most of the MSSC's artifacts (other than Apollo 9, of course) and planned to build a new Michigan Space and Science Center. As of now (January 2009), the planned new building has been put on hold due to fund raising shortfalls, with only some of the more major artifacts on display.

Here is the Google Maps aerial view of it as it is today (I'm not certain what the airplane is doing parked on the lot). The white, pentagon-shaped building was the museum proper. To the west are four concrete pads on which the F-1 engine, J-2 engine, A-6 engine, and Pegasus micrometeoroid satellite formerly sat. The Mercury-Redstone sat on the sidewalk leading to the building.

As I said, we visited in fall 2002 and spring 2003. This was before my obsession with taking tremendous numbers of detailed pictures had fully developed, so this collection of photos is much smaller than that from other museums.

I found two diagrams of the interior of the MSSC, somewhere on the Internet. I'm pretty sure that they weren't on the official MSSC site, and I'm pretty sure that I found them after it was closed. I arranged the photos of artifacts inside the museum based on my interpretation of these maps.