All Stories

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.

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.

The 2011 Major League Baseball season starts today at 1:05pm, when the National Air and Space Museum’s hometown Washington Nationals host the Atlanta Braves at Nationals Park. This afternoon the red and white uniforms of the Nationals will stand out against the bright green of the field.  In the late 1950s, players took to the field of the U.S. Naval Air Material Center in Philadelphia wearing a different uniform—B.F. Goodrich Mark IV spacesuits. 

The first decade of the twenty-first century has offered both serious challenges and enormous potential for the development of new human launch vehicles that could finally achieve the long-held dream of reliable, affordable access to space. But at the end of the decade, the policy questions posed by the 2003 loss of Columbia about the future U.S. human spaceflight still loom large.

On March 18, 2011, at 8:45 pm EDT, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft ever to enter Mercury's orbit. In this blog, Tom Watters reflects on the importance of this achievement.

The announcement last year that Bill Moggridge was selected to be the new head of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York gave me pause. In my daily work I tend to stay on a narrow path of aerospace-related topics, but that name sounded familiar. A glance at my bookshelf gave me the answer: before joining the Cooper-Hewitt, Moggridge was a co-founder of the international design firm IDEO, and while there he played a crucial role in the design of the world’s first laptop computer: the GRiD Compass, first marketed in 1982. The unusual capitalization of “GRiD” was a trademark of the company that developed it.

1986 was supposed to be a banner year for the United States in space—12 shuttle missions scheduled, the most to date, including launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. 

Sixty-two suits.  Toni Thomas and I came up with that number after several days counting spacesuits and flight suits on stepladders in the Environmental Storage Room, Building 24 (ESRB24) at the Paul E. Garber Facility.  These were the pressure suits in the National Air and Space Museum spacesuit collection that still needed soft, conservation-correct storage mannequins.  That was June 2009.  Amanda Young had just retired after the successful publication of her and Mark Avino’s book Spacesuits: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Collection. The book culminated fifteen years of hard labor on her part to document, reorganize and standardize the preservation, storage and exhibit conditions for the Museum's spacesuit collection. 

As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close what might we consider the ten most important events in space exploration and discovery?

I was pleasantly surprised when the clouds rolled out and the weather turned out to be favorable for the total lunar eclipse last night!