All Stories

Spacesuit curator Cathleen Lewis explains Neil Armstrong's quote appears the way it does in the case of Neil Armstrong's spacesuit.

We take a look at the famous speeches that led to the first Moon landing, and one that thankfully never had to be delivered.

From an outsider’s perspective, Lamar Dodd must have seemed like an unlikely choice for a commission to create paintings on the subject of space. Dodd was in the first group recruited for the NASA Art Program, which tasked artists with translating the cultural and scientific monumentality of the space missions to a national audience.

"When I was a kid – maybe 5 or 6 – I remember my dad calling me into the living room and sitting me down in front of our almost comically tiny black-and-white TV screen."

Bob Gilruth, more than anyone else, created the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs and the Houston center that managed them.

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin was the first astronaut to receive a degree of Doctor of Science (Sc.D). We explore his thesis on “Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.”

Abraham Silverstein (1908-2001), created and named the Apollo program and, most critically, pushed the adoption of liquid hydrogen as a rocket fuel for the boosters that launched Apollo. 

Some of the world’s best pilots are the ones you hope never to see. In this episode, we’re talking about air rescue.

2019 marks the 70th anniversary of two long-distance light plane records by William P. Odom. Those records were set in the Museum’s Beechcraft 35 Bonanza, which is displayed at our Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. In addition, it is also the 100th anniversary of William Paul Odom’s birth, on October 21, 1919, in Porum, Oklahoma.

May 2, 2019, marks the United States’ Days of Remembrance, the nation’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust.  Today the National Air and Space Museum remembers Dezsö Becker, a Hungarian aviator who served in World War I and died in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in January 1945.