All Stories

The upcoming Kenneth C. Griffin Exploring the Planets Gallery at the National Air and Space Museum will give visitors a new perspective on the many worlds within our solar system.

Astronomers at Harvard’s central observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its new observatory in Arequipa, Peru, ultimately produced over 500,000 glass plate images of the night sky. Directors of the Harvard College Observatory hired women to study, organize, and care for its immense glass plate collection in Cambridge.

Did you know the National Air and Space Museum has a huge art collection? Yeah, we keep that secret pretty well. It all STEMs (see what we did there?) from a program organized by NASA beginning in the 1960s where a small number of American artists got tons of access to launch sites, clean rooms, space suits, spacecraft—you name it, they painted it.

The new Jay I. Kislak World War II in the Air gallery is being carefully planned to provide a poignant and exciting perspective on World War II aviation for new audiences.

On May 5, 1961, a Redstone rocket hurled Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule, Freedom 7, 116 miles high and 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Freedom 7 parachuted into the Atlantic just 15 minutes and 22 seconds later, after attaining a maximum velocity of 5,180 mph. Shepard, a Navy test pilot and NASA astronaut, became the first American to fly in space.

On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American to travel to space.

We look back at the extraordinary life of pilot, astronaut, and statesman Michael Collins, who has died at the age of 90.

National Air and Space Museum acting director Christopher U. Browne reflects on the life and legacy of one of his predecessors, Apollo 11 astronaut and former Museum director Michael Collins.

For the first Earth Day in 1970, cartoonist Walt Kelly trenchantly captured the core tension of humanity’s relationship to its home world as expressed through environmentalism and climate change: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Any child of the 80s or 90s knows about Space Camp. But, what’s its origin story? And how did it become such a part of the millennial zeitgeist? (Even Mary Kate and Ashley solved a Space Camp mystery—spoiler alert: it was woodpeckers). Emily, Matt, and Nick break it down.