How do the National Air and Space Museum and the Civil War intersect?  Come find out as we tell the story of the Union Balloon Corps  founded in June 1861 by President Abraham Lincoln. 150 years ago next month Thaddeus Lowe demonstrated ballooning to President Lincoln on a spot just north from where the Museum now stands on the National Mall.

Since Howard McCurdy and I co-authored Robots in Space: Technology, Evolution, and Interplanetary Travel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), I have been interested in the possible merger of humans and robots into a single entity to undertake space exploration.

From April 20 to April 23, curators from the Aeronautics Division and the Space History Division attended the 2011 National Conference of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) in San Antonio, Texas. Tom Crouch of the Aeronautics Division organized a session on museum collecting and collectors titled “Collecting the Popular Culture of Flight at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum,” and the participants presented papers on collections that we curate. Tom spoke about the Balloonomania Collection of balloon-related furniture and furnishings; Alex Spencer of the Aeronautics Division talked about the Mother Tusch Collection, which contains many significant personal artifacts of military aviation; Margaret Weitekamp of the Space History Division discussed the O’Harro Collection of space memorabilia and popular culture; and I talked about the Stanley King Collection of Lindbergh memorabilia and popular culture.

Last week the Smithsonian Institution hosted the state Teachers of the Year, who were in town for their annual visit to the White House.

May 6th marks the anniversary of the tragic end of the airship Hindenburg, destroyed by fire as it came in for a landing at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey, in 1937. Last year, to commemorate the anniversary, we posted the story of Anne "Cookie" Chotzinoff Grossman, who, on October 9th, 1936, spotted the Hindenburg in flight from her Connecticut schoolyard. She took off in hot pursuit along with her brother Blair, but the giant airship got away from them; Cookie and Blair trudged back to school, and Cookie was made to write “I will not follow the Hindenburg” on the blackboard a hundred times.

Why is the smiling Pan American Airways flight attendant holding a box of baby chicks, and why have the chicks been dyed in festive colors?

Things such as the Hope Diamond, the Star Spangled Banner, the Lansdowne portrait of George Washington, and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis airplane are good examples—one-of-a-kind items, familiar to all, and widely known to reside at the Smithsonian.  Also in this subset of signature objects is one of the most significant in the entire Smithsonian collection—the Wright Flyer, the world’s first airplane.

Most people know that satellites in orbit do useful things such as collect images of the Earth's surface. At the National Air and Space Museum I use satellite images in my job to understand changes in the Earth's land surface.

On the morning of March 2, I got an excited text message from fellow astronomy educator Shelley Witte, telling me that the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Discovery would be coming very close to transiting the Sun from our position at the National Air and Space Museum’s Public Observatory at exactly 3:08 pm.

On Saturday, March 19, I was thrilled to participate in the first ever Sun-Earth Day Tweetup organized by the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. It was also the first time the Smithsonian officially participated in a Tweetup. The event was a great opportunity to give twitter fans (aka “tweeps”) some face-to-face interaction with our research scientists, curators and educators, and provide some fun hands-on learning that illustrated the Sun-Earth connection.