How a Lexington resident built a museum to Apollo 11 in his own home 

Watching “Fly Me to the Moon” for the first time last summer, David Meerman Scott noted a few scenes with a familiar plot. Astronauts treated like heroes, advertisements for OMEGA watches and Tang, and a specific scene where the characters practice doing television from the moon. 

The film stars Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in a fictional romantic comedy set during the 1969 space race. But much of its factual information comes from Scott’s 2014 book “Marketing the Moon,” co-authored with Richard Jurek. The book calls the public relations and marketing campaigns around the Apollo 11 program “the greatest marketing case study in the world.”

“I’m thrilled that they took considerable effort to get the details right,” Scott told the Lexington Observer during an interview at his home. “I’m glad they did it from my book, but more than that, I’m really, really happy they didn’t just dismiss that aspect of it.” 

A Lexington resident since 1996, the 63-year-old Scott is a renowned marketing and sales expert known for his work as an author of 12 books — including BusinessWeek bestseller “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” and Wall Street Journal bestseller Fanocracy.

He also happens to own the impressive private collection of Apollo space program artifacts as part of a private, in-home museum, Apollo Artifacts, and both a private physical and public digital collection of Apollo Press Kits. 

Scott previously lived in New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong. A graduate of Kenyon College in Ohio, Scott worked as a bond trading clerk, sales representative, product development manager, marketing director, vice president of marketing and even as a part-time model before focusing on his own business. He’s presented in 41 countries and on all seven continents. Scott also serves as a limited partner and strategic advisor for Stage 2 Capital venture capital fund. 

How Scott ended up with a carefully curated museum with more than 100 artifacts in the former entrance of his home started with a childhood love for the Apollo program. As an eight-year-old, the Connecticut native remembers following the Apollo 11 mission and watching Neil Armstrong become the first man to walk on the moon.

“It was unbelievably important to me,” Scott said. “I wasn’t into sports or much else, but I was absolutely fascinated by men going to the moon.”

Nearly three decades later, Scott browsed the shelves of the Barnes & Noble in Burlington without any intention of reigniting his passion for space. Yet memories flooded when he stumbled upon a book about Apollo. He bought it, read it and its contents channeled a renewed interest. Meeting astronauts at an event sponsored by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation led to his interest in starting the collection that now tastefully sits in his home. 

The museum, which is not open to the public but is occasionally open for private tours, filled the perfect role for Scott and his wife, Yukari Watanabe Scott, while planning a home renovation. The home’s original entrance hall serves as the gallery space, all built to Scott’s specifications.

Joe Welch and Lexington-based CW Design Group oversaw the full renovation. With the expertise of Robert Segal, a museum exhibition designer and President Emeritus at Massachusetts Air and Space Museum, Scott and his team of builders and subcontractors traded the windows and outside doors of the former entrance hall for a darker room fit for artifact-amplifying lighting. The full list of materials and details of the layout, which finished construction in 2017, is found on the Apollo Artifacts website. 

Walk up a few stairs into the museum, and a photo of the moon taken from at least 10,000 miles away makes up the left wall, with artifacts from a command module on display. Across the room is a photo of the moon’s surface with related artifacts, including the Apollo Guidance Computer display and keyboard (DSKY) built by Raytheon when it was headquartered in Lexington. Other favorites of this reporter include the actual hand controller from Apollo 12, a backpack used by astronauts during training, a strap used by the commander of Apollo 15 complete with lunar dust and the pencil used by the late Apollo 9 commander Jim McDivitt, whom Scott purchased it from directly.

“The kids love it,” Scott said as he scribbled with the pencil on my notepad. 

As an adult, visits to the Kennedy Space Center, National Air & Space Museum and Marshall Space Flight Center fortified his interest. He pored over the biographies of the Apollo astronauts, purchasing signed editions and in so doing unofficially started the collection. Coming across collectSPACE, an online forum for those interested in space, led to Scott’s discovery of the many ways one can acquire Apollo program artifacts: from people who worked for subcontractors who built spacecraft, at auction, directly through the astronauts themselves, or in one case, from an attendee at a presentation in town honoring the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. 

“I look at myself as a curator of these materials for a few years until eventually they end up going to a proper museum,” Scott said. “It’s my intention to find a good home for many of those artifacts so they can be preserved.” This is true for both the Apollo Artifacts and Apollo Press Kits, the latter of which may go to a journalism school. Exactly when remains to be determined.  

In addition to supporting the movie in an unofficial manner, NASA itself recognized Scott’s work in 2019 when he visited the organization’s Washington D.C. headquarters and provided some guidance on how to market going to the moon. NASA gifted Scott a flag flown during a recent space mission. 

And another key takeaway, which was also touched on in the movie: give no credence to conspiracy theories about faking the moon landing. The late Gene Cernan, the most recent person to walk on the moon and author of “Marketing The Moon’s” foreword, shared his perspective with Scott over dinner some years ago. 

“If we had faked it, the Russians would have called us out on it,” Cernan told Scott. “The Russians were tracking our spacecraft in real time as it was on the surface of the moon. Had we not actually flown to the moon, said we did it, and filmed it somehow in Hollywood, the Russians would have absolutely called us out on it.”