Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum

Colorado

Parked among Cold War fighter jets in a Denver hangar is a three-quarter scale X-Wing built to promote the Star Wars re-release.

historicalroadsidecultureengineering

The X-Wing is a Lucasfilm prop, made at three-quarter scale to promote the re-release of the first three Star Wars films in 1997. It shares the floor with a MiG-23, a Grumman Tomcat, a Rockwell B-1A, and a nuclear weapons collection. There are cockpits cut from a United Airlines DC-10 and a Boeing 727. Fifty aircraft in all, under more than a hundred and eighty thousand square feet of hangar. The hangar itself is the leftover of Lowry Air Force Base, which trained technicians on the eastern edge of Denver from the late thirties until 1994. More than one point one million enlisted members and officers graduated there, learning everything from armament to photography. By the 1980s the base was one of Colorado's largest employers, roughly ten thousand people. When the Air Force shut it down, it handed Hangar One to a group of volunteers. They turned it into a museum. Three years later the state legislature made it Colorado's official one.

Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.

What this was written from
Lucasfilm X-Wing Starfighter: a 3/4 scale replica built to promote the re-release of the first three Star Wars films in 1997.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Washington Park, Denver 4.2 mi A Titanic survivor bought a condemned cottage in Denver and had it hauled across town into a park.
  • Chez Artiste 4.5 mi A suburban Denver twin cinema was opened by a man who would later buy Twentieth Century-Fox and sell it to Rupert Murdoch.
  • Denver Art Museum 5.1 mi A famous Italian architect built exactly one thing in the United States, and it is a twenty-four-sided castle in downtown Denver covered in a million glass tiles.
  • Dick's Sporting Goods Park 5.8 mi A World Cup qualifier here was played in a blizzard, and the losing team filed a protest with FIFA over the state of the field.
  • Denver Technological Center 6.7 mi This office park started on forty acres, split between two developers who each took one side of the interstate.
  • Regis University 8.7 mi Queen played their first concert in the United States on this campus, in April of 1974.