A fantastic new post about the museum just hit Paul Fraser Collectibles wonderful blog. The article is a very nice tribute and overview of the museum, how I started the collection, and my interests in the bill. You will enjoy the other article's on Paul's site, too, so make sure you poke around -- especially in the space collectibles sections. UPDATE: And they did an expanded version of the article, with more pictures of the bills, and more background on the collection. Read this version here.

Noted collector and paper money blogger Tom Chao wrote about the new Jefferson Space Museum on his blog site. You can see the post by clicking here. Tom's blog is great! If you are at all interested in Paper money, you really need to check it out. Also his famous world paper money gallery, which can be found here. Thanks for the blog post, Tom!

Earlier this month, I spent time down at the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation's annual gathering at the Kennedy Space Center. On my way down, I stopped off in Sarasota at the office of the Paper Money Guaranty folks to show them the flown Jefferson bills. They've got some fatastic offices and people down there. We spent some time chatting about flown currency, and I left them with a lot of resource material, provenance paperwork, etc. (Copies, of course....) And they were kind enough to certify and slab the bills in their PMG holders. I got the idea from going to the World's Fair of Money exposition in Chicago this past year, seeing all the wonderful exhibits of historic paper money....all of which was usually PMG slabbed, cataloged, and certified. It was a great experience, and another attempt by the Jefferson Space Museum to educate those in the paper money world about these unique bills. Afterward, I took the bills back to the ASF show, and here is a picture of Gene Cernan with the JSM bill of his that flew on all three of his missions, including landing on the moon during Apollo 17. It was a nice opportunity to reunite Gene with the bill, and we had a great time chatting about it once again.

And in an ultimate display of vanity -- and fun loving commercialism -- we've launched a Jefferson Space Museum gift shop, with logoed items that are, ahem, reasonably priced. Some cool items. And best yet, they feature the museum logo, which was custom designed for us by noted German space artist and illustrator Detlev van Ravenswaay. Now how cool is that?

After many years of collecting the bills for the Jefferson Space Museum, we have finally reached a point to launch a full fledged virtual museum! The site will go live on Sunday, November 27, 2011. Check out our new place on the web at The Jefferson Space Museum. (Many thanks to Fish-I Design & Video for their work on the site.) And please join us here in the conversation, as we post to this blog updates on new acquisitions, research on the bills in the collection, and discuss space artifact collecting in general.