All Stories

Welcome to Season 3! Today we’re talking about secret space shuttles--seriously! 

The Smithsonian's Digitization Program Office takes you behind the scenes of how they captured a comprehensive 3D dataset of the largest museum artifact ever to be digitized: Space Shuttle Discovery

2 Space Shuttles + 1 asteroid the size of Texas + a dash of 90s rock = the most terribly wonderful space movie of all time? Well, maybe for Emily, Matt, and Nick.  This fall has got us hooked on space movies. So, Emily, Matt, and Nick decided to rewatch the 1998 film Armageddon to see how many inaccuracies they could find. 

When John Glenn boarded the shuttle orbiter Discovery he was 77 years old—the oldest person yet to venture into space.

Teacher in Space Christa McAuliffe’s lesson plans fly in space 32 years later. 

Space Shuttle Enterprise, the first space shuttle orbiter ever built, was once displayed where Discovery is today. Despite both being part of the Space Shuttle program, the two served very different purposes and tell very different stories.

While the Discovery is hard to miss at the Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, the little-known details help tell the orbiter’s unique and important history.  

The patches on Sally Ride’s flight jacket help tell her groundbreaking story of spaceflight.

When my STS-98 crew launched into orbit on February 7, 2001—the first human space launch of the millennium—I marked the milestone by carrying with me two personal mementos of the landmark Stanly Kubrick science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On April 17, 1993, astronaut Ellen Ochoa, and the crew of the STS-56 Discovery, returned to Earth after a nine-day mission. Ochoa made history as the first Hispanic woman in space.