The Space Museum and Gus Grissom Center

The Newton County Tourism Council has reached an agreement that will bring The Space Museum and Gus Grissom Center — currently located in Bonne Terre, Missouri — to Neosho.

The museum, founded in 1999, had outgrown its home and was looking for a location on an interstate. Neosho offered both the room and the access. But the deciding factor was history.

Spacetown, USA

From 1956 to 1968, Rocketdyne-Neosho — a division of North American Aviation — built rocket engines here. The work included components for the Apollo Saturn program that carried astronauts to the moon. During those years Neosho was known as Spacetown, USA.

That heritage is why the museum's leadership looked at Neosho in the first place. A museum devoted to American spaceflight belongs in a town that helped build it.

What it means for the area

A destination museum brings visitors, and visitors spend money in local restaurants, shops and hotels. It also gives the area something harder to quantify: a reason for people passing through on I-49 to stop, and a story about Neosho that reaches well beyond the region.

The move also dovetails with a documentary in production about Camp Crowder, which covers both the camp's World War II history and the postwar rocket engine work that followed.