In its early days, tourism was a relatively new concept, but grew slowly before exploding with the advent of air travel around 1959, the year Hawaiʻi became a state. Today, tourism is driven by the island's exotic tropical locations, and Kīlauea, being one of the few volcanoes in the world in a more or less constant state of moderate eruption, was a major part of the island's tourist draw. According to the National Park Service, Kīlauea is visited by roughly 2.6 million people annually, most of whom proceeded to visit the volcano from the Kilauea Visitor Center near the park entrance. The Thomas A. Jaggar Museum was also a popular tourist stop. Located at the edge of Kīlauea Caldera, the museum's observation deck offered the best sheltered view on the volcano of the activity at Halemaʻumaʻu; however, the museum closed indefinitely after the building housing it sustained structural damage from earthquakes associated with the 2018 eruptive episodes.