All Stories

Over fifteen years after the Columbia tragedy, Michael D. Leinbach, Space Shuttle Launch Director, and Jonathan H. Ward, space historian, look back at the harrowing process of recovering the spacecraft. 

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the Columbia disaster.  Every year on this date I think about the crew of the Columbia, my students, and my most difficult day as a teacher. 

NASA Earth Observatory science writer Adam Voiland has searched through thousands of NASA’s satellite images and astronaut photography, looking for the entire alphabet in images taken from space.

‘Tis the season for holiday cards.  Many cards feature photos of families and pets dressed in festive (maybe even matching) outfits.  Aviators, on the other hand, celebrate their airplanes! The many collections in the National Air and Space Museum Archives are filled with enough cards to last well beyond the 12 days of Christmas.

In 1977, Star Wars: A New Hope, the first installment on George Lucas’s famous Star Wars film series, became one of the biggest box office hits of all time. It also gave rise to an innovative mass-marketing campaign for toys and other products that became an industry model.

The phenomenon of contact with aliens has its own history. It was not always the case that those contending they had an encounter with extraterrestrials described the experiences as coercive and frightening. On the contrary, in the decade and a half after the first reports of flying saucer sightings in 1947, most prominent stories of close encounters of the third kind described the aliens as inviting, friendly, and kind.

Today would have been visionary science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 100^th birthday (1917-2008). In the many decades since his first writings, his renown and influence still reverberate, motivating a range of contemporary thinkers.

With its spherical shape and piecemeal construction, it’s easy to see similarities between the Telstar satellite and the infamous Death Star of the Star Wars films. Aside from a passing resemblance in design, both pieces of technology also address a larger question that has been a focal point for humankind in reality and fantasy: what does space mean for humanity?

On display in a galaxy not so far, far away: the National Postal Museum's R2-D2 mailbox, currently on view at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

After all the food has been cleared away, and the good dishes are set aside for the next holiday, a question still remains—what do you do with all your Thanksgiving leftovers? When faced with yet another turkey sandwich, take some inspiration from the creative culinary tastes of astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).