All Stories

Conservation of Michael Collins' razor from the Apollo 11 mission presented conservators with a complex ethical dilemma for deciding the best treatment approach: how to arrest degradation while maintaining the historical elements of the artifact.

In the over 40 years our lunar touchrock has been on display, millions of people have walked through our doors and touched a piece of the Moon. Intrigued by this idea, staff photographer Jim Preston took over 60 photos of visitors touching our little piece of the Moon.

Not long after the successful Apollo 11 mission, its three crew members were invited to speak to Congress. In this guest blog, Apollo 11 command module pilot, and former director of the National Air and Space Museum, Michael Collins recalls those remarks.

In the late 1960s, Poppy Northcutt was a return-to-Earth specialist with TRW, working on a contract with NASA on one of the most exciting adventures of the 20th century: humanity’s quest for the Moon. With computer programming skills and a degree in mathematics, she worked with her team at TRW on the development of the return-to-Earth program. And she became the first woman in Mission Control.

Today we’re talking about a really cool project that brought together one former-Mythbuster, a couple of Smithsonian units, and makers across the country to reimagine an incredible piece of Apollo engineering.  

On September 6, 1969, Neil Armstrong was welcomed home with a parade in his hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, with flags, banners, Bob Hope, and the Goodyear Blimp.

Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. is an appropriate name for a pioneering space explorer. Kraft did not explore space himself, but he made it possible for American astronauts to do so, from Mercury to the Space Shuttle. He was the primary inventor of the mission control concept, and implemented it during Project Mercury and after, including training a cadre of controllers and creating a worldwide tracking network.

Before Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon and before he flew on Gemini 8, he was a NASA test pilot. Noted for his engineering excellence and technical capability as a pilot, Armstrong became one of only 12 pilots to fly the ultimate experimental aircraft – the North American X-15.

In this blog celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, we explore how the astronauts listened to music during the mission, what was on their playlists, and musical critiques of the Apollo program.

In this guest blog from Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, Roy Avezedo reflects on Raytheon's role in the Apollo 11 mission and what comes next.