all right margaret i know tell me about this i know what it is but let's talk about it so this
is a screen used t70 x-wing vehicle that is on loan to us from lucasfilm and we are delighted
just over the moon that this is here and going to be going uh outside the planetarium in the
downtown museum up on that second floor mezzanine i don't think there's anything more appropriate
than an x-wing hanging in the smithsonian air and space museum but let's talk right away
yes because i know that some people might have an issue with that yo you know why does the premier
museum of real aviation and real space flight want an imaginary spaceship yes um imagination
right and this imagination and inspiration and those are such important themes for everything
that we have here uh and we know if you want to design and build and fly any of these things
you have to be dreaming it up and a lot of that starts with these fictional visions and the
power of that and so what better thing to bring in than an x-ray fighter from the star wars universe
so the six-year-old obsessed with x-wings right now is the potential future aerospace engineer
if you can show them the connection i think so and i think that when you look at the artistry of how
this is designed how it's developed when you look at the difference between this and the t-65b that
luke skywalker would have flown right you see an art designer who is then thinking about like
what would the next generation look like how might they have developed the engines how much have they
developed the guns um and i love that interplay because i think you know that the folks who are
thinking up these props are digging deep into the technical manuals on actual fighters right and
thinking about how do we translate some of that visually into this vehicle and that virtuous cycle
of imagination and inspiration that's built into like every object in this place and this firmly
belongs in that pantheon i think so and i love it in conversation with the other objects because i
think that when we can put things next to each other then you get to start to have some of
those conversations hopefully between various visitors and being able to have this downtown
will i think really sparked that okay so this is a room in which you bring in priceless weird
unique one-of-a-kind objects and you make them ready for showtime yes i'm curious as to what it
was like to bring a fictional aircraft in here and if your procedures had to change to accommodate it
in any way it's actually not that different we've got the same people working on it who would be
working on our real things um and we consider this a real piece of science fiction history and then
the techniques are the same yeah we're trying to make sure that it's safe for hanging we're really
thinking about the rigging about what uh how we're best going to be able to support this vehicle
it's built so that it looks like it won't really exist well in 1g right in gravity and um that
makes it challenging and it was really built mostly to stand yeah although we can hang it
right it was right it structurally wasn't built to ha oh right so that's so that's a whole thing
you have to engineer that then we're really thinking about you know how and so you can
see all of the cranes and various test picks have been being done to make sure that everything stays
visually the way that you want it to stay while it's also safe okay so the other thing that the
decision another decision that gets made a lot here is how far to restore something or leave
its original witness marks but in the star wars universe everything has already been pre-weathered
to look like it's already been beaten so are you having to go through and kind of parse the
difference between its actual weathering and its aesthetic weathering very much so and that
was actually one of the really fun things if we can walk a minute um i'll kind of swing around
this way and point to this which looks like a little bit of what we would call hanger rash
hanger rat so that's a great phrase when you move objects around they bump into each other the crate
rubs on them the crane rubs on them and this was a piece where when i first came through and said oh
you know from a distance i saw this bright piece of orange and thought you know it must have gotten
scraped and shipping and in fact that's original to the vehicle it's drawn on hanger rash and so
the folks were delighted to point that out to me and say like you know no so but yes that's exactly
it is trying to figure out how do we keep that worn lived-in universe look that's integral to
the artifact um what about getting it here is it roughly a similar process of crating and shipping
to like with any kind of large airplane yes and i think you can see that all through the hangar the
wings come off aircraft the spacecraft are always built often to be collapsed into a fairing so we
work with that kind of stuff all the time and i get to say we in a big generous way that includes
the historian amongst the people who actually know how to do this and and if the uh if the empire
rises again they'll ask for this back to fight for the cause potentially potentially and we're
trying to keep it in the shape that it needs to be if it needs to go back into service um who gets to
sit in the cockpit does a restorer get to sit in that car you have to do part of the restoration
there the cockpit is actually fitted out and um equipped so we in fact had a conservator in there
this morning who was working on some things so um what a dream yes and we it was very important
also to make sure that we had the canopy shined up nicely it came looking rather dingy sure um
the plex and you know we know any pilot even in a galaxy far far away wants a good line of sight
sure is this a specific pilot's ship this is poe dameron's from rise of skywalker uh so we'll have
r2d2 as the astromech in the back oh he is yeah oh and we're really working with lucasfilm to make
sure that we get those details exactly right right can i come help we would love to have you again
you