Museum Lumbering to Liftoff : Aircraft: Seven years after the idea of a display took hold, planes lie scattered and exposed at Edwards Air Force Base, home to aviation and space pioneers.

Doug Nelson, the museum curator at Edwards Air Force Base, has helped assemble an array of more than 50 aircraft at the nation’s premier flight test facility, enough to make aviation buffs olive drab with envy.

The collection includes a massive B-52D Stratofortress, a pair of sleek and speedy Blackbird spy planes, sisters to the X-1 rocket ship flown by Chuck Yeager to first break the sound barrier in 1947, and even a P-59B Airacomet, a version of the country’s first jet.

There’s just one problem: Despite his title, Nelson doesn’t have a museum. Seven years after the start of the formal effort to develop one, many of the planes still sit scattered and exposed throughout the huge Mojave Desert base, the home of many aviation and aerospace pioneers.

Test pilots such as Yeager and Palmdale Mayor William J. (Pete) Knight may have set numerous speed and altitude records above Edwards’ famed dry lake beds in past decades. But the progress they and others have made in trying to build a museum chronicling those decades of history has been painfully slow.

“It was difficult to gain momentum when every time we tried to do something, we ran into roadblocks,” said Knight, a retired Air Force colonel who is chairman of the nonprofit group formed to build the museum. “But it’s time now to do something.”

Hampered by Air Force regulations that forbid the use of public funds for museum construction, stalled by the military’s own bureaucracy and forced to rely on volunteers in the past, museum backers are only now beginning an official fund-raising drive that they hope will collect $6 million for the museum.

Nelson, who was hired as the base’s civilian curator in 1986, said construction of the planned 60,000-square-foot building cannot even begin until the money is raised. Supporters are confident that they will succeed, but the fund-raising alone is expected to take two to three years.

Major aerospace companies such as Lockheed, Rockwell International and Northrop are expected to be important donors. And supporters hope that the museum will become the anchor for a set of attractions dubbed the Antelope Valley Aerospace Heritage Trail, which will honor the region’s history.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration already has a visitors center at its facility at Edwards. The city of Lancaster in September unveiled its Aerospace Walk of Honor patterned after the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And a plan to display a pair of Blackbird spy planes at nearby Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale is progressing.

The museum at Edwards, however, is still more a wish than a reality. “Never in a million years did I think it was going to be this complicated,” said Nelson, a chief master sergeant who ended his 22-year Air Force career to take the curator’s job at Edwards.

If the Flight Test Historical Foundation can build the museum, base officials will support it with public funds at a cost that could hit several hundred thousand dollars a year. The facility would be one of seven Air Force base museums in California and one of 29 nationwide, officials said.