Two Guns, AZ (# 0474)

Surprising that the proximity of Meteor Crater didn't have some spillover in terms of supporting a tourist economy.

Per Wikipedia, the crater was initially named for Canyon Diablo, which is the old railroad town that Two Guns replaced. But I couldn't find anything indicating when they started developing Meteor Crater as a tourist site. Since astronauts trained in decades ago, maybe the tourist development was fairly recent?

From trips as a kid to El Paso back in the early 60s, it's been a tourist site forever--at least since Nininger discovered it wasn't going to work as an iron mine! But it had kind of a "fringy" feel for years and years, like lots of the tourist traps you'd see along the highway back in the day. That's slowly changed as impact as a geologic process became respectable--my late adviser Gene Shoemaker demonstrated the impact origin of the crater in the late 50s, and that's what led to the astronauts training there. The crater remains privately owned to this day, but they've slowly redone the exhibits to have more actual science. It now feels like a "legitimate" museum, if you will, and I'm sure that tourist traffic is much greater now because of the "real" space connection.