The San Diego Aerospace Museum was established on October 12, 1961, and first opened to the public in February 1963 in the Food and Beverage Building, which had been built for the 1915 exposition. From its earliest days, the museum's mission was to document San Diego's extraordinary contributions to aviation — a story that included Glenn Curtiss, Charles Lindbergh, Ryan Airlines, Consolidated Aircraft, and the Navy's North Island, all of which had made the region a center of American aviation development.

The museum outgrew its initial location and moved to the larger Electrical Building in 1965. The move gave the collection more room to expand, but also placed it in a structure whose fire suppression was not adequate to what arsonists would eventually do to it.

The arson of 1978 destroyed artifacts that cannot be replaced. The Beecraft Wee Bee — the world's lightest aircraft — burned. Its companion, the Queen Bee, burned as well. A 1967 reproduction of the Spirit of St. Louis, built by some of the same people who had built the original, burned. More than 50 aircraft were lost in total, along with the archives, the Hall of Fame, and the accumulated material of more than fifteen years of collecting.

The loss was particular as well as quantitative. Some of what burned was genuinely unique — objects that existed in no other form, whose destruction meant the permanent subtraction of specific knowledge from the human record. Aviation preservation is always a race against time, corrosion, and accident; the 1978 fire was a particularly devastating instance of that reality.

The museum rebuilt in the Ford Building — a Balboa Park structure originally constructed in 1935 for the California Pacific International Exposition and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The move into the Ford Building gave the collection a permanent home in a more fire-resistant structure and a more prominent location in the park.

The rebuilt collection grew substantially over the years following the fire. The museum now holds aircraft spanning the full history of powered flight, from early replicas of pioneer designs to jet fighters and the command module of Apollo 9. The Apollo 9 Command Module Gumdrop — flown by James McDivitt, David Scott, and Rusty Schweickart in 1969 as a crucial test of the lunar landing mission hardware — sits in the Theodore Gildred Rotunda at the museum's entrance, a genuine artifact of one of the most significant accomplishments in human history.

The San Diego Air and Space Museum organizes its permanent collection around the story of San Diego's contributions to aviation. The World War I Gallery, the Golden Age of Flight Gallery, the World War II Gallery, and the Modern Jet and Space Age Gallery trace a chronological narrative that is also a local story: San Diego was present at nearly every significant moment in American aviation development.

Lindsbergh's Spirit of St. Louis was designed and built here. Consolidated Aircraft, which became Convair, built some of the most important military aircraft of World War II here. The Navy's North Island was where aerial refueling was invented and where the first transcontinental non-stop flight concluded. The museum holds that story in a building that was itself damaged and rebuilt — which gives it, in a way, an appropriate relationship to the history it preserves.