All Stories

In the 1930s, rocketry was basically a joke among the scientific establishment in the US, but that didn't stop a rag tag group out of Pasadena from trying to build rockets. 

Discover the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

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.

Rockets launched the Space Age. They provided the power needed to take spacecraft and people on flights beyond the Earth.

Project Paperclip was a program that brought German and Austrian engineers, scientists, and technicians to the United States after the end of World War II in Europe.

Learn about the integral role speed played during the Cold War.

To tell the story of the Space Age, the new RTX Living in the Space Age exhibition will share how the Space Age impacts the lives of people worldwide, through the stories of people and objects which brought it about. Learn more about the upcoming reimagined gallery.

On May 5, 1961, a Redstone rocket hurled Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule, Freedom 7, 116 miles high and 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Freedom 7 parachuted into the Atlantic just 15 minutes and 22 seconds later, after attaining a maximum velocity of 5,180 mph. Shepard, a Navy test pilot and NASA astronaut, became the first American to fly in space.

The Archives of the National Air and Space Museum holds three million images in various photographic formats, covering the breadth and depth of the history of aviation and space flight. One such collection is the Herbert Stephen Desind Collection, which covers the history of space flight and exploration.  

The V-1 cruise missile was not the war-changing weapon Nazi leaders hoped it would be but the American military set out to copy it for use against Japan prior to an invasion.