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AirSpace is looking up! We're exploring how we hang really, really big, priceless artifacts from the ceiling in the museum.

The National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center turns 20.

One of the icons of the Museum was the black-and-white German V-2 ballistic missile. Ever since the building opened in July 1976, it stood in Space Hall, which in 1997 was revised to become Space Race. That rocket will return in a new guise, with green camouflage paint, when the hall reopens in a few years as RTX Living in the Space Age.

A conversation with aerospace engineer Dennis Jenkins who works with the space shuttles, relying on his expertise in orbiter construction to ensure their maintenance as museum artifacts. 

Throughout his career, Museum curator Ron Davies collected everything--tickets, timetables, brochures, photographs, public relations releases, and baggage labels—from airlines around the world from his travels. He encouraged his friends and colleagues to save their materials for him. He wrote to airlines and aircraft manufacturers soliciting information. This material, totaling over 62 cubic feet, became the basis for the R. E. G. (Ron) Davies Air Transport Collection at the National Air and Space Museum Archives.

Discover the process behind the conservation treatment of a set of batteries that Samuel Langley used in laboratory experiments, providing power to Langley’s later aviation and scientific experiments.

As a cub in the 1930s, Gilmore made aviation history when he traveled around the United States with the flamboyant and colorful aviator Roscoe Turner as a mascot for the Gilmore Oil Company. This is the second in a three-part blog series about the conservation treatment of Gilmore the Flying Lion. Explore how the Museum balanced caring for the original taxidermy with the goal to present Gilmore as lifelike as possible.

Sitting atop a pedestal in front of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is the abstract sculpture Continuum, 1976, by Charles O. Perry, known for his public art installations located at buildings, universities, and parks. Continuum is typically described as a Möbius strip, a star shooting through a black hole, a design inspired by geometry, or the continuous flow of the universe.

A small group of enthusiasts keeps World War I airplanes aloft.

As a cub in the 1930s, Gilmore made aviation history when he traveled around the United States with the flamboyant and colorful aviator Roscoe Turner as a mascot for the Gilmore Oil Company. Read and see images of the detailed discoveries made during the initial examination of the conservation treatment of Gilmore.