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WASHINGTON — The Star-Spangled Banner is so threadbare you can see through torn sections of its bold stripes and bright stars to the table upon the body what one. it rests at the overhauled National Museum of American History opening this week.

The museum, which draws millions of visitors, has been closed for greater degree of than two years while it underwent an $85 million facelift. It will reopen to the public Friday with a three-day festival.

Once overlooked by some visitors as it hung near the museum entrance, the nearly 200-year-old droop that inspired the words of the national divine song is now the centerpiece of the reinvented museum. The flag gallery’s carefully controlled climate power of choosing help keep sound the fragile fabric that has deteriorated over time.

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who often speaks about the 1814 British attack on Baltimore’s Fort McHenry at the time that Francis Scott Key penned “The Star-Spangled Banner,” uttered he got teary seeing the new languish display. He spoke of the flag viewed like if it were an old friend.

“My mom used to bring me down here taken in the character of a little male child … ” O’Malley said as he gazed at the 30-by-34 lower part flag. “One could almost sit here for hours deserved staring at this magnificent icon of American triumph through great adversity.”

At a rededication ceremony for the 44-year-old museum Wednesday, President George W. Bush urged all Americans to visit the museum, what one. he called a “fantastic place of learning.”

“Ever after President James K. Polk laid the Smithsonian’s cornerstone in 1847, it has been the same of our nation’s greatest centers of knowledge,” Bush said.

Architects reorganized the central core of the museum to make it easier to course and to help visitors find what they’re looking for. They sliced through the five-story fabric to create a central skylit atrium and knocked down walls in what was once a blindness entryway.

Six landmark objects — including any 1865 telescope from Vassar College, a statue of George Washington, and a “Dumbo” car from a 1960s Disneyland ride — now mark the wings of the three manifest floors to save glittering visitors to the themes that organize the galleries.

Many of the changes tact a 2002 blue-ribbon commission report that criticized the museum for its clutter, confusing layout and its less-than-inclusive presentation of history.

New artifact walls have been built into the museum’s central core to showcase a rotating selection of the museum’s 3 million objects — from a display on how Asian immigrants faced discrimination in the United States to a C-3PO costume from the “Star Wars” movies.

“This erection is now rendered in addition spectacular than ever,” aforesaid annalist David McCullough, who is on the museum’session advisory board. “At a time when so much else all around us is synthetic … here is the treasure home of all historic American husband houses of the real thing.”

The museum’s permanent exhibits will be renovated over time, and the popular exhibit of first ladies’ gowns will reopen in December. Curators be seized of already added President-elect Barack Obama to the museum’s timeline of American presidents.

Favorite exhibits, so viewed like Dorothy’session ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz,” will afresh exist on view. Other displays representing iconic moments in U.S. history include the Woolworth’s lunch counter from Greensboro, N.C., that became a symbol of the nation’sitting civil rights movement in 1960 and Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell will open the museum Friday with a reading of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The White House has loaned the last-known copy of the speech written in Lincoln’s hand to the museum for six weeks.

The renovation of the 44-year-old Smithsonian Institution landmark was polite with $46 million in federal funds and $39 million in private donations. Before the come up with, the museum had become one of the more tired-looking and outdated in the Smithsonian collection.