Space fans looking to camp out in style have a chance to pick up an Airstream trailer that once served as the Convoy Command Vehicle for NASA’s Space Shuttle operations at Edwards Air Force Base – if they have a couple hundred thousand to spare, that is.
“This is the NASA 025 Command Vehicle,” current owner Jonathan Kitzen says of the once-silver, now paint-daubed and otherwise unassuming Airstream trailer. “NASA 025 was designed to land crewed missions at Edwards Air Force Base.
“[Airstream] informed me that this was, in their, words, ‘the only NASA Airstream ever sold,’ and the others [001-024] were all crushed or in museums. The sister crew vehicle (a 28-ft with one rear axle) is sitting at Kennedy museum [the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex]. All the rest are gone, except for this one.”
Kitzen picked up the vehicle in 2022 up after spotting it on a government surplus auction site, where it had been listed with few details and at a very low starting price. As for how the rare vehicle ended up for sale in the first place, Kitzen says he was told it was a mistake.
“Apparently there was some miscommunication when the vehicle was decommissioned,” he claims in the sale listing. “It should have been offered to museums but the sales team did not know what it was. They were told it was just a ‘NASA vehicle,’ they did not know it had any special status or history. To the sellers they thought it was just a van that could have been for moving laundry around the base. It was an accidental (yet valid) sale.
“When I pulled up to Vandenberg Air Force Base after getting my NASA contractor badge I was greeted by the senior asset manager,” Kitzen continues. “‘We didn’t know what we were selling!’ were the first words out of her mouth. ‘We didn’t advertise it or offer it up to museums, the phone has exploded. Nobody told us what it was!'”
Kitzen may have been able to capitalize on that mistake thanks to research by engineer MacCallister Higgins, who nearly picked the Airstream up himself. In a 2022 Twitter thread, Higgins was the first to publicly identify the vehicle, which had been repainted and was missing its NASA livery, as being the official Convoy Command Vehicle for Space Shuttle operations at Edwards Air Force Base.
“My plan was to purchase and restore this NASA beauty,” he wrote at the time, “but I’m not going to be able to handle the logistics of shipping and repairs in the time frame required.”
The original auction ended at $21,061 (around £15,840), but Kitzen is hoping for a little more than that: the listing on vehicle sale site Hemmings.com has an asking price of $199,000, though with no offers yet submitted. It’s not the first time he’s tried to flip the trailer either. A listing on eBay with a $50,000 minimum bid and $290,000 buy-it-now price ended in May with no takers.
“We spent $45,000 developing as-built plans and modification strategies,” Kitzen says by way of justification for the valuation, “because Airstream does not have any of the final blueprints and the blueprints that came with the vehicle including approximately 3,000 pages of documentation do not line up with the actual vehicle that they produced and modified over the years. You can use it for any purpose you want except military. Just park it down at Cape Kennedy or in Vegas and you will be making a constant and continuous $150,000-200k++ a year.”
Well-heeled NASA fans can find the listing here, though they should be aware the vehicle is controlled for export under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), “cannot be exported or sold to hostile entities” and that, despite Kitzen’s dreams of hundreds of thousands of dollars in exhibition income a year, any use other than recreational will require prior clearance from the US State Department. ®
