Stymye,
It depends on how you define history. Built, launched once, busted up then sitting in a box in the basement doesn't mean much history to me.
That Mercury Redstone of mine that was unopened belonged to a man named Herb Desind. He was a science teacher at Laurel High School in Laurel Maryland. He was known for his amazing Cineroc films that he took all over the world. I first met him in 1980 at the Pearl River Model Rocket Seminar in Pearl River New York giving a talk on model rocket photography. His was always the most popular lecture and everyone looked forward to it every year. His involvement with kids and model rocketry got hundreds if not thousands of children into the hobby of model rocketry. He did demonstrations all over the place and participated in the bi-monthly launches at the Goddard Space Flight Center religiously. When I used to visit my Brother in Maryland I always used to spend time with Herb building rockets, flying cameras and looking through his collection of old kits. He was a great friend to me and the hobby.
A few years back Herb died very suddenly in his 40s from complications after routine surgery. His father who knew we were friends (I was a paw bearer at his funeral) gave his collection to me. When I look at any of these kits they represent a great deal of history to me and I will never part with them. Herb was the reason I got into model rocketry and have stayed with it for 25 years. Air & Space magazine recently did a story on him and the collection he had of tens of thousands of pictures of rockets, missiles, spacecraft and satellites that was donated to the Smithsonian after his death.
So don't assume history where there may be none and don't think that an unopened kit is just a bunch of parts that no one bothered to assemble.
