New Artifact Acquisitions 

Summer 2020, the Museum acquired a new drone for its collection. Wing delivery drone No. A1129 was used for the first commercial drone delivery to a U.S. home in October 2019. The drone will help the Museum tell the story of the commercial uses of uncrewed aircraft in the upcoming Allan and Shelley Holt Innovations Gallery, the opening of which will be announced at a later date. 

In November 2020, the Museum welcomed a new aircraft: a Blue Angels F/A-18C Hornet. This recently retired Hornet is the first Blue Angels aircraft the Museum has acquired and it will allow it to tell stories of the Navy’s flight demonstration team as well as its time in combat. The F/A-18C is now on display in the Boeing Aviation Hangar at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

New Artifacts on Display

In March 2020, Apollo 11 command module Columbia returned to National Air and Space Museum display following a two-year tour across the country. It will be on temporary display just outside the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar at the Udvar-Hazy Center until it is moved to the Museum’s location in Washington, DC, for display in the upcoming Destination Moon exhibition. 

Also recently put on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center is a Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Surface System Test-Bed (SSTB), acquired by the Museum in late 2019. This rover is nearly identical to the MER twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, although it was designed for use on Earth. Before it found a new home at the Udvar-Hazy Center, it spent its life crawling around the In-Situ Instruments Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), playing a critical role in problem solving whenever the rovers on Mars faced physical obstacles or mechanical challenges. 

Visitors were able to see these two new additions to the Udvar-Hazy Center while it was briefly reopened from July to November 2020.

Digital Access to Artifacts

In February 2020, the Museum supported the launch of the Smithsonian Open Access Initiative, featuring over 1,200 high resolution images of objects in the National Air and Space Museum collection freely available for the public to download and reuse. In 2020, Air and Space open access images received over 3.4 million views and 137,000 downloads.

Work continued on the Museum’s Air and Space Photo initiative, made possible through the generous support of the Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family Foundation. Through the initiative, the Museum's photography team is capturing high-resolution images of the Museum’s iconic large aircraft and spacecraft and making them available to the public. Artifacts photographed in 2020 included Sukhoi Su-26m, Grumman F8F-2 Bearcat “Conquest I,” and Loudenslager Laser 200. In 2020, Air and Space Photo content received over 600,000 views on the Museum’s website, and 4.7 million views on social media.

Web and Social Media 

With both locations closed or limited access for much of 2020, the Museum’s social media and website became an important channel for sharing its collection and passion for aviation and space with its audience.

• Museum social media received 8.6 million engagements, nearly double the number of engagements in 2019.
• The Museum’s social media accounts gained 180,000 followers in 2020, going from 784,000 followers total to 964,000 followers total.
• Blogs posts received 1.6 million page views in 2020, up from 1 million page views in 2019.
• Collection pages received over 2.2 million page views. 
• The Museum’s new Air and Space Anywhere webpage received over 250,000 views. 
• The Museum’s new Learn portal for educators and parents received over 125,000 views.