All Stories

Some Smithsonian artifacts that memorialize these achievements might be closer to you than you realize. Through collaborations with affiliate organizations, the Smithsonian sponsors traveling exhibitions and loans artifacts to museums throughout the United States and abroad. 

The story of NASM's three-foot-tall doll wearing a scaled-down copy of the real Mercury spacesuit. 

The touching story behind a 1960s charm bracelet.

Are you a lover of all things lunar? Here are three hidden gems from the Destination Moon exhibit you won’t want to miss.  

In the late 1950s, he United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a competition for global influence and prestige—the Cold War—and began to compete on a new frontier: space. Both nations started programs to send humans into space. In the United States, that program was Project Mercury.  

If you've heard the famous line "Houston, we've had a problem," you may be wondering: just who exactly is Houston?

To tell the story of the first American in space, the Museum has conserved and digitized the Mercury suit Alan Shepard wore during the first American human spaceflight in 1961. The suit will be displayed in the new Destination Moon exhibition.

John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth.  It’s good to remember what exactly he accomplished. 

As we ring in 2022, we celebrate the friends that make the National Air and Space Museum so special.

Can you eat in space? What do you eat in space? These might seem like ridiculous questions now—after all, who hasn’t sampled astronaut ice cream—but they were very real concerns at the advent of the space program.