All Stories

Preparation of the upcoming Time and Navigation exhibition is in full swing, and objects are being installed in cases throughout the gallery.  In fact, the gallery became a little more shiny just in time for the holiday season thanks to a delivery from our friends at the Naval Research Laboratory.

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!

I knew Neil Armstrong, not all that well, but for a very long time.

We will all miss him, not just because he was the first human being in the history of the world to set foot on another body in the solar system, but perhaps especially because of the honor and dignity with which he lived his life as that first Moon walker.

Museum staffers are busy outfitting our new shuttle middeck for spaceflight.

Astronaut Alan “Dex” Poindexter joined fellow Space Shuttle commanders and crewmembers at the Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center recently to welcome Discovery to its new home in the Smithsonian. Poindexter commanded the next-to-last Discovery mission, STS-131, in 2010. He also served as pilot on Atlantis for the STS-122 mission in 2008. Both shuttle crews delivered equipment for construction of the International Space Station. Poindexter joined the astronaut corps in 1998 in the midst of a distinguished career as a naval aviator, first as a fighter pilot, then as a test pilot. He served two deployments in the Arabian Gulf during operations Desert Storm and Southern Watch in the early 1990s.

“You put an X anyplace in the solar system, and the engineers at NASA can land a spacecraft on it,” so said actor Robert Guillaume in an episode of “Sports Night.” Amen brother, the team that landed Curiosity proved the truth of that statement one more time with the successful landing of a big rover on Mars in the wee morning hours of August 6, 2012! It was a stunning success.

Mars has long held a special fascination for humans—in no small measure because of the possibility that life either presently exists or at some time in the past has existed there. In his classic work Cosmos, Carl Sagan asks an important question: “Why Martians?” Why do Earthlings not similarly obsess over “Saturnarians” or “Plutonians?” As a planet resembling our own, Sagan concludes, Mars “has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears.” NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover is scheduled to land on the Red Planet in the early morning hours of August 6, 2012 EDT. Thus, “Why Mars?” is a question that we will seek to answer for visitors to the National Air and Space Museum.

Unlike many astronauts, Sally Kristen Ride did not dream of going into space since childhood. She was already in her mid-twenties, completing her Ph.D. in physics, when the idea dawned. NASA was recruiting women to apply to become astronauts for a spacecraft that had not yet flown: the Space Shuttle.