Milwaukee once tried to launch its own space center. It never took off.

Milwaukee in the 1950s and '60s had an ambitious construction checklist. 

A sports arena. A major-league baseball stadium. A new zoo. A freestanding natural history museum. A horticultural center. A performing arts center.

By 1968, most of them had been checked off the list. 

Then there was the space center. 

First proposed in 1954 as a planetarium for the proposed new public museum, the project by the mid-1960s had morphed into something bigger.    

On Feb. 3, 1966 — on the same front page reporting that a spacecraft from the Soviet Union had made the first-ever soft landing on the moon — The Milwaukee Journal reported that officials were set on building a state-of-the-art space center, including a planetarium, exhibits and classroom space, to promote science and space education in Milwaukee. 

The giant, egg-shaped facility would sit northeast of the new Milwaukee Public Museum at 835 N. 7th St., atop the under-construction parking garage and freeway access tunnels.

The project's price tag: nearly $1.7 million (about $13 million in 2018 dollars). Officials were counting on nearly $1.5 million (more than $11 million today) of that coming from the federal government, in a grant being sought by Milwaukee Public Schools. 

City, school and museum officials were so sure the cash was forthcoming that they hired a director for the center, Robert Thompson. 

Even when the feds only came through with $74,000 in planning money, backers were undeterred. Besides, as The Journal reported, "columns and other foundation structures for the planetarium must go in with the rest of the concrete work even if the building itself is delayed." 

Then, in 1967, with a chunk of the project completed — the ground floor poured, weight-bearing walls constructed, foundations in place — the funding dried up. 

To keep the space center project alive, organizers, with money borrowed from the Friends of the Museum, converted about one-third of what had been built into temporary quarters, and walled off the rest, unfinished and unheated.

In January 1968, the Common Council gave the space center "a vote of confidence" by agreeing to pay Thompson's salary for five more months. But not everyone was excited about it. Ald. Clarence M. Miller, one of three aldermen to vote against picking up Thompson's paycheck, told the Milwaukee Sentinel in a Jan. 19, 1968, story the project was "a luxury that the city of Milwaukee cannot afford." 

Meanwhile, for all the work that had been done, what by 1968 was being called the Wisconsin Regional Space Center had yet to open to the public.

So on July 7, 1968, the center's temporary digs were filled with science exhibits on topics such as "Let's Make Atoms" and "Radiation and Man" (the latter courtesy of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission), as well as space equipment from NASA, including a full-scale model of a lunar orbiter and an Agena rocket. 

"We want to expose everyone, especially the youngsters, to all the problems, wonders and dangers of the future," Stephan Borhegyi, director of the Milwaukee Public Museum, told The Journal in a July 8, 1968, story. 

Other exhibits followed, including the Gemini 7 capsule flown by astronaut and Milwaukee native James A. Lovell in 1965, which landed at the space center on Nov. 7, 1968. 

Although the exhibits attracted about 100,000 visitors by that fall, the space center was in trouble. On Sept. 23, 1968, the board of the Milwaukee Public Museum, then overseen by the city of Milwaukee, asked the Common Council for $19,845 in additional funding for the space center, as part of a plan for the museum to take over the project. 

The Common Council initially said no, but in November 1968 reversed itself, OK'ing just enough money for the space center to operate. 

In January 1969, in an apparent attempt to boost fundraising efforts, the project was renamed the James A. Lovell Regional Space Center. It wasn't enough.  

On Nov. 9, 1969, The Journal reported that the center — still without heat — closed its doors on Oct. 26, after NASA took back its last exhibit. 

In October 1996, not far from the site of the space center, the Milwaukee Public Museum and Discovery World jointly opened the Humphrey IMAX Dome Theater, a 3-D and IMAX theater showing mostly science- and space-related programming. Now known as the Daniel M. Soref Dome Theater & Planetarium, the facility is, more or less, back to the original idea: a planetarium. 

Our Back Pages: 1968 

About this feature 

On Wednesdays this year, the Green Sheet's Our Back Pages will look back at 1968 in Milwaukee, sharing stories of the events that shaped and reflected a changing city as reported and photographed by the Journal Sentinel's predecessor newspapers, The Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel.  

Special thanks and kudos go to senior multimedia designer Bill Schulz for finding many of the gems in the Journal Sentinel photo archives.