All Stories

Friday the Thirteenth always puts me in the mood to listen to Stevie Wonder's hit, “Superstition.” Although I’m not particularly superstitious, I’m probably not going to take chances like a group of aviation cadets did at the Air Corps Training Detachment, Hawthorne School of Aeronautics, Orangeburg, South Carolina, in February of 1942.

When Neil Armstrong's family contacted the Museum about artifacts he left in his home office in Ohio, museum curators Margaret Weitekamp (social and cultural history of space exploration), Alex Spencer (personal aeronautical equipment), and I (as Apollo curator) traveled to Cincinnati and were warmly greeted by his widow, Carol.

Another important step in finishing the Museum's He 219 Uhu (Owl) night fighter has been completed. Recently, the wing was painted and transported to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, for the aircraft’s final assembly.

Milton Rosen was a pioneer of American rocketry development.

At the height of the summer of 2013, when I was getting ready to go on maternity leave to have my second child, I found myself as the only curator signed on to an anniversary exhibition celebrating the first spacewalks done in 1965...Feeling a bit under qualified and overcommitted, I went on to find out just what it took to make something notional only 18 months ago into a beautifully vibrant reality. Here are some of the lessons I learned and proudest moments from this experience.

Following months of preparation, members of the Collections Processing Unit moved the center section of the Horten Ho 229 V3* from the Paul E. Garber Restoration and Storage Facility to the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar at the Udvar-Hazy Center last Friday.

It was particularly timely that during the hustle and bustle of the 2014 holidays, I, along with curators Jennifer Levasseur and Cathleen Lewis, had a very special package to open for the very first time.

A full-size engineering model of the Pioneer 10 /11 spacecraft normally hangs in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall at the National Air and Space Museum. However, a few weeks ago it was removed and placed in the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, while the Milestones gallery undergoes a major renovation in the coming months.

Paul Garber (1899-1992) is a legend around the National Air and Space Museum, and rightly so.

There is a common saying that the hands are where the mind meets the world. In space there is no direct contact between the mind and the world. This transaction is mediated by the artificial structures called gloves.