Manhattan, KS
The last large intact tallgrass prairie in North America — and one of the most thoroughly extinct ecosystems on the continent. Before European settlement, tallgrass prairie covered 170 million acres from Indiana to Kansas. Less than 4% survives today; the rest was plowed into farmland by 1900. The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, established 1996 in the Flint Hills of east-central Kansas near Strong City, protects 10,894 acres — the largest single tract of unplowed tallgrass in the U.S. The Flint Hills survived because the rocky limestone subsoil made plowing impossible: the land could only be grazed, not cropped, so the original sod stayed in place. Bison were reintroduced in 2009 (a herd of about 100 today). Big bluestem, Indian grass, little bluestem, and switchgrass grow to 8 feet tall by late summer. The Spring Hill / Z Bar Ranch headquarters is preserved as a working ranch with an 1881 limestone barn and house. The preserve sits at the convergence point where a co-managed NPS/Nature Conservancy/private-ranch model has kept the land intact.
A 105,000-square-foot Smithsonian-affiliate museum on the Hutchinson Community College campus, holding the largest combined collection of U.S. and Soviet/Russian spaceflight artifacts in the world — second only to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum overall, but more comprehensive than any single museum on the Soviet side. 13,000+ artifacts. The collection includes three flown spacecraft from the first three crewed U.S. space programs: the Liberty Bell 7 Mercury capsule (recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic by the Cosmosphere's SpaceWorks team), Gemini X, and the Apollo 13 Command Module Odyssey — assembled piece by piece from across the country after scattering. Soviet items include a flown Vostok capsule and Voskhod hardware acquired during the 1990s after the USSR's collapse. The museum also built ~80% of the spacecraft props for Ron Howard's "Apollo 13" film. The story is local: Patty Carey, a Hutchinson civic leader, set up a used starball projector in a poultry building at the Kansas State Fairgrounds in 1962. By the late 1970s the museum was the right size in the right place to absorb post-Apollo artifacts NASA needed to disperse.
Wichita has called itself the Air Capital of the World since the 1920s and is one of the only American cities that can claim the title with no asterisks. Travel Air (1925), Cessna (1927), Beechcraft (1932), and Stearman (1927) were all founded here within seven years of each other. Boeing built B-29s in Wichita during WWII. Today Spirit AeroSystems, Textron Aviation (Cessna + Beechcraft), Bombardier, and Airbus all maintain major operations on or adjacent to KICT. The Kansas Aviation Museum occupies the original 1935 Wichita Municipal Airport terminal building, just south of the Spirit factory. The Air Capital Memorial flame on the airport grounds honors the airmen and engineers from Wichita who built American aviation.
The Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum sits along Interstate 80 near Ashland, between Omaha and Lincoln, southwest of Offutt Air Force Base. The collection started outdoors on the Offutt flight line in 1959, the brainchild of SAC commander Thomas Power and Colonel A. A. Arnhym. Curtis LeMay supported it from the start. The aircraft sat exposed to Nebraska weather for forty years. In 1998 the museum moved into a new $30 million indoor complex, 300,000 square feet across two climate-controlled hangars plus a glass atrium designed to display the SR-71A. The atrium shows a Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird (tail number 61-7964) suspended below 525 glass panels. Around it: a Convair B-36J Peacemaker (one of only four surviving), a Convair B-58 Hustler, a Boeing B-47E Stratojet, a Boeing B-52B, a B-29 Superfortress, a Lockheed U-2C Dragon Lady, a Rockwell B-1A Lancer (one of only two surviving), a Boeing KC-97G tanker, a Martin RB-57E, a Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, an Avro Vulcan B.2 on loan from the RAF, and a North Vietnamese MiG-21. The McDonnell XF-85 Goblin is one of only two ever produced. Indoor exhibits also include a Mark 17 thermonuclear bomb, an actual Minuteman silo control panel, and Curtis LeMay artifacts. The aircraft at the heart of the Looking Glass Featured Story is here too: Boeing EC-135 Looking Glass, tail number 63-8049. Restored in 2024 to its 1961-1990 configuration; the airborne command post flew continuously for twenty-nine and a half years to mirror Offutt's underground command center. Visitors can walk inside. Outside the museum, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles stand vertical in front of the entrance. Most were live ordnance at some point.