All Stories

The central theme of the Time and Navigation exhibition is the connection between timekeeping and determining position. During the development of the exhibition, we realized it was not enough to show devices for accurately measuring time and position. We wanted visitors to grasp why it's true that "If you want to know where you are, you need an accurate clock."

Did you ever read a “choose-your-own-adventure” book as a kid? What about watching old episodes of Law & Order on cable? I enjoyed both, since it always felt like I was really working to solve a problem, either on my own or vicariously through Detective Lennie Briscoe (played by the incomparable Jerry Orbach). Sometimes, my job as a curator at the National Air and Space Museum benefits from my love of solving a mystery, and researching the collection of space cameras gave me that opportunity starting in 2004.

It’s said that “art imitates life,” but how about baked goods imitating geologic formations!

Suitably clad in a custom-made flying suit and sporting a pair of goggles, President Warren G. Harding's 1921 Thanksgiving turkey, the gift of the Harding Girls' Club of Chicago, arrives at the College Park (Maryland) airport on a DH-4 mailplane.

On October 24, Stanley, winner of a historic robot race, left its home at the National Museum of American History aboard a flatbed truck and arrived safely at its destination, just seven blocks away. For the foreseeable future, Stanley will be here at the National Air and Space Museum, a centerpiece in the exhibition Time and Navigation:  The Untold Story of Getting From Here to There. The irony of the situation escaped no one.  Stanley, a driverless vehicle that had navigated 132 miles on its own to win the 2005 Defense Advanced Research Projects Grand Challenge, needed the help of scores of people AND a truck ride to get from there to here.

Washington, DC is filled with museums of all shapes and sizes that feature educational exhibits and activities for kids. Developing learning opportunities for different ages at a museum requires a lot of planning. Staff must identify an audience for each program, know how to best engage that audience (combining the latest scholarship about informal learning with an understanding of various learning theories and recognition that people learn in many different ways), define a learning objective (what do we want the audience to learn?) and figure out how to make it fun.

At our evening observing sessions at the Public Observatory, we’ve shared views of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, and other astronomical objects with thousands of visitors. But Neptune, the most distant planet in the Solar System, is one that I’ve not yet looked at with the main 16” telescope.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay is one of the National Air and Space Museum’s most heralded artifacts, but a new addition to the National Air and Space Museum Archives Division’s collections provides a glimpse into the lives of the crew before they became worldwide names.  In May, the Archives accepted an accession of three State of Utah individual liquor permits for 1944 to 1945 (Acc. No. 2012-0027). 

In the past, fellows have written about everything from spaceflight in the Soviet Union to the "Nisei" stewardesses on Pan American Airways. If you were to apply for a fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum, what would you research?

Growing up in the Washington, D.C. area during the 1960s was... interesting - History would have a way of occasionally butting into an otherwise typical suburban boyhood.