All Stories

It's hard to spot the familiar US insignia of the white star on a blue circle, but the black and white stripes the Lightnings wear stand out easily - which is a very good thing. In 1944, in the months leading up to the invasion of Nazi occupied France, the Allied planners of Operation OVERLORD realized that on the day of the invasion - D-Day - the skies over the invasion zone would be filled with aircraft.

When we think of D-Day, we tend to envision the waves of landing craft approaching the beaches and Landing Craft Tanks (LCTs) with barrage balloons in tow, or maybe waves of C-47s winging away from their bases in Southern England with their paratroopers. These are powerful visuals and while the soldiers and paratroopers really did do the heavy lifting of liberating France, these images overshadow a remarkable and invisible war that is often forgotten.

On April 24, we passed another milestone in preparations to move the Horten 229 V3 center section from the Paul Garber Facility in Maryland to the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.

This, the 87th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s epic solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1927, gives us an opportunity to revisit the diminutive Ryan airplane that carried the twentieth century’s best known aviator into history.

As people start making their summer vacation plans, I often daydream about traveling around the world.  Then I realize that I don’t even need to leave the office to see far off places. The National Air and Space Museum Archives' photography collection allows me to travel anywhere (and almost any time in the past 100 or so years)! My virtual vacation begins with the pyramids in Giza, Egypt, in 1926.

In the mid twentieth century, the thought of sending humans into space was only the makings of science fiction. On April 9, 1959, sci-fi and reality merged as NASA introduced the seven American astronauts who would participate in the first human spaceflight program in the United States, Project Mercury. 

Soon after the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, images and data from its instruments revealed that its main mirror was optically flawed. It suffered from spherical aberration—not all portions of the mirror focused to the same point. The mirror’s shape was off by less than 1/50th the thickness of a human hair, but this tiny flaw proved devastating to the quality of the Hubble’s images and to the efficiency of all of its instruments.

When Space X launched the Dragon Spacecraft on Friday, April 18, it was carrying nearly 5,000 pounds of supplies and payloads, including critical materials to support more than 150 science investigations planned for International Space Station (ISS) Expeditions 39 and 40.  Among these materials are some that weigh hardly anything at all—microbes—of which one type was collected right here at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

If you live in North America or western South America, you have a treat in store for you tonight or early tomorrow morning: a total lunar eclipse! If you live elsewhere in the world, or if it’s cloudy in your location – as it probably will be tonight at our location in Washington, DC – you can still see the eclipse online.  Several websites will host live streams.  Some of their locations will be clouded out, so we recommend that you search for “lunar eclipse live stream” and browse the results.  You can also participate in a live web chat during the eclipse with NASA astronomers.

The National Air and Space Museum Archives hold biographical information on many people related to aviation, but it is still surprising to find articles about one Antonie Strassmann, a famous German actress of the 1920s. The few clippings indicate a fascinating story – a woman pilot who had performed on stage and in silent movies, who flew in balloons, held a world record in cycling for women, and loved to box. But was Strassmann really one of these aviatrixes of the 1920s who were often accused of donning a flight suit and goggles for the sake of publicity only?