ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief introduction to the site of memorialization followed by a theoretically informed autoethnography of some elements of that site undertaken between 2005 and 2006. It proposes how specific practices and spaces in two sites of memorialization - namely the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) and Kennedy Space Center's Visitor Complex, organize, and disorganize, progressive histories. The messianic teleology of a progressively better future the core of mythologies of an American transcendental state since Puritanical Divine Providence is thus rendered impossible. Two of the more surprising objects on display in the NASM can be found towering over the left hand side of the Milestones of Flight gallery as one enter from the Mall: the American Pershing II and Soviet SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Next to the NASM, the visitor complex at John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida, stands as perhaps the most well-known public site through which to memorialize, and indeed encounter, American spaceflight.
