All Stories

At age 30, Afghan-American pilot Shaesta Waiz became the youngest woman to circumnavigate the globe solo in a single-engine aircraft. (She managed to snap a photo or two along the way.) Waiz shared some of her favorite images from her record-breaking journey.

Jeannie M. Leavitt became the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot in 1993.

On October 15, 1910, Kiddo the cat became the first of his kind to attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean by airship—and he wasn’t very happy about it.

While Bessie Coleman never realized her dream of opening a flight school for African American pilots, her legacy as the first African American woman to earn a pilot’s license has impacted and inspired flight students for decades.

The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, has a new addition: Nemesis NXT, a record-breaking Sport-class air racer.

Meet Jon and Patricia Sharp, the husband and wife duo behind Nemesis Air Racing. 

Sustainable energy has been at the heart of modern innovations large and small, from efficient light bulbs in living rooms to solar panels powering buildings. One of the newest breakthroughs in energy technology can often be found zipping around the streets in front of the Department of Energy (DOE) in Washington, DC—a car powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

On October 4, 2017, Shaesta Waiz became the youngest woman to fly solo around the globe in a single-engine plane. Before completing her historic flight, the Afghan refugee visited the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum to share her story and what helped her succeed. 

You may know of the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova) or the second (Svetlana Savitskaya). But do you know the name and the story of the third female cosmonaut? Elena Kondakova may have not been the first woman in space, but she was the first woman to enter the cosmonaut team-in-training program with male classmates. She set the precedent of mixed-gendered selections that exists in Russia today. 

When the Museum collected objects from Dr. Sally K. Ride's personal collection in 2013, it became clear that Dr. Ride privately say many connections between her history-making spaceflight and the state of American women in politics and public life. Several political buttons found in Dr. Ride's personal desk in her home study tell that story. Curator Margaret Weitekamp shares how these artifacts help tell the full arc of Dr. Ride's life.