All Stories

A new National Air and Space Museum Archives collection documents the story of Helen James, a member of the United States Air Force who was arrested and discharged as part of a campaign to remove LGBTQ people from government employment in the 1950s.

Unlike many astronauts, Sally Kristen Ride did not dream of going into space since childhood. She was already in her mid-twenties, completing her Ph.D. in physics, when the idea dawned. NASA was recruiting women to apply to become astronauts for a spacecraft that had not yet flown: the Space Shuttle.