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The Massachusetts Air and Space museum is coming to an airport near you (hint: Beverly Airport)

You’ve likely heard of the National Air and Space Museum. The Massachusetts Air and Space Museum? Probably not so much.

But Beverlyites need to get up to speed on it because it’s coming to your hometown.

The Massachusetts Air and Space Museum is planning to move to Beverly Airport later this year. The commission that oversees the airport voted this week to approve a lease that will allow the museum to use a building at the airport that once housed a restaurant but is now mostly empty.

So what is the Massachusetts Air and Space Museum — MASM for short — and why is it coming to Beverly?

Exhibits from the Massachusetts Air and Space Museum.

The museum was started as a nonprofit in 2007 by a group of aviation and aerospace enthusiasts. It has been located in Hyannis on Cape Cod, most recently in a storefront on Main Street, but closed down last September when the landlord said it had to move out.

Joseph Dini, the vice chair of the museum’s board of directors and a Burlington resident, told me that MASM has had its eye on Beverly Airport for years. A previous plan to move here fell through. But now the whole thing is a go.

“Beverly just kept coming back to us (as a possible location),” Dini said. “What a beautiful place. The North Shore is incredible.”

The museum is relatively small. Dini said all of its artifacts — things like a working cockpit from a Coast Guard plane and a jet engine from GE — will fit into the 3,000 square feet that will be available in the building at Beverly Airport. The museum also has exhibits on, for example, Story Musgrave, one of the astronauts who repaired the Hubble Space Telescope, and another on 18 astronauts with ties to Massachusetts.

But Dini said MASM is primarily an educational museum. It will have lots of hands-on experiences that kids will like (adults too), he said, like flying an airplane or a drone on a simulator and pretending to be an air traffic controller directing flights to land.

Dini said organizers are excited that there are so many schools on the North Shore, and they would love to partner with North Shore Community College, which has offered an aviation program out of Beverly Airport for years. The airport has also been home to a Civil Air Patrol unit for years.

“There will be something going on every week for young people related to aviation and aerospace,” he said.

Dini said the museum was located near the airport in Hyannis, but actually being on airport grounds is a huge improvement.

“An air museum not on an airport doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said.

Beverly Regional Airport Manager Gabriel Hanafin said the museum will draw people to the airport who otherwise would have no other reason to stop by.

“It’ll give people a reason to come out to the airport even if they’re not pilots or flying,” he said. “It offers a chance for members of the community to come out and see what we have here.”

Hanifan said the airport commission has approved a 20-year lease for the museum, with the airport receiving a percentage of gross sales.

Dini said MASM wants to be part of the community on the North Shore and plans to host various functions and movies related to aviation and aerospace. He said the museum will be open four days a week and it will draw about 100 people per week on the low end. Admission will be in the range of $10-$13 for adults and $5-$6 for kids. They plan to hire somebody to manage and curate the museum. Everyone else, such as the docents, will be volunteers.

Dini said the museum needs to raise money to pay to fix up Building 45, the building it is moving into. They’re shooting for a February 2026 opening. All of its artifacts have been in climate-controlled storage since it closed last year.

“This is the most exciting opportunity we’ve had,” Dini said.