Biography|Michael Suffredini — The Mall Museum That Handed the Station Its Trophy

The National Air and Space Museum stands at 655 Jefferson Drive SW, on the south side of the National Mall.

On 27 April 2011 the museum held its black-tie trophy dinner in Washington and gave the Current Achievement award to Michael Suffredini and the International Space Station Program Office.

The Smithsonian announced the winners on 5 April.

George Mueller, who had run NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight in the Apollo years, took the Lifetime Achievement trophy the same night.

Jack Dailey, then the museum's director, said the pair showed that the most complex work in flight still came down to leadership and a team.

The citation treated the station as assembled.

That was slightly ahead of the hardware.

Endeavour's STS-134 flight in May 2011 still had to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and finish the last U.S. assembly tasks.

Atlantis closed the Shuttle program that July.

The trophy was the public verdict on the decade Suffredini had just spent in Houston.

He had managed pieces of the station effort since 1995 and the whole program since August 2005.

The award is now called the Michael Collins Trophy.

In 2011 it was still the National Air and Space Museum Trophy, a miniature of John Safer's sculpture The Web of Space.

The Mall building is the pin, not a private banquet room.

A visitor can walk the same Jefferson Drive frontage the dinner guests used that April.

The museum's own release is the primary source for the date, the two winners, and the claim the museum was making: that living and working in orbit had become ordinary enough to honor.

Photo: Photograph of the National Air and Space Museum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons