All Stories

On December 7, 1941, a US Navy squadron consisting of ten Sikorsky JRS-1 amphibious seaplanes was on station in the Hawaiian Islands. Shortly after the Japanese attack that Sunday morning, the planes were launched in an effort to locate enemy submarines and ships near Oahu. 

How did you get an airplane inside the building?  Is there life on other planets?  What EXACTLY is GPS and how does it work?  Why in the world is that in this museum? We hear these questions every day.  There’s so much that goes on in museums that people just don’t understand.  And there are a lot of interesting artifacts tucked into smaller galleries that visitors simply don’t notice.  Then there are the GREAT stories behind every artifact – stories that just don’t fit on a label. 

The announcement last year that Bill Moggridge was selected to be the new head of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York gave me pause. In my daily work I tend to stay on a narrow path of aerospace-related topics, but that name sounded familiar. A glance at my bookshelf gave me the answer: before joining the Cooper-Hewitt, Moggridge was a co-founder of the international design firm IDEO, and while there he played a crucial role in the design of the world’s first laptop computer: the GRiD Compass, first marketed in 1982. The unusual capitalization of “GRiD” was a trademark of the company that developed it.

If you’re looking for some online fun, try out several Web activities from our newest exhibition, The Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery. The exhibition introduces some of the colorful aviation personalities from the 1920s and 1930s.

I have a hunch that there aren't a lot of aerospace museums that could come up with an appropriate image for Groundhog Day, but it's at moments like this that the National Air and Space Museum's Archives Division really shows the range and depth of its holdings.

1986 was supposed to be a banner year for the United States in space—12 shuttle missions scheduled, the most to date, including launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. 

In 1909, military aviation began with the purchase of the Wright Military Flyer by the U.S. Army.  The Navy sprouted wings two years later in 1911 with a number of significant firsts. 

Sixty-two suits.  Toni Thomas and I came up with that number after several days counting spacesuits and flight suits on stepladders in the Environmental Storage Room, Building 24 (ESRB24) at the Paul E. Garber Facility.  These were the pressure suits in the National Air and Space Museum spacesuit collection that still needed soft, conservation-correct storage mannequins.  That was June 2009.  Amanda Young had just retired after the successful publication of her and Mark Avino’s book Spacesuits: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Collection. The book culminated fifteen years of hard labor on her part to document, reorganize and standardize the preservation, storage and exhibit conditions for the Museum's spacesuit collection. 

Check out these must-see aircraft and space objects during your next (or first) visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center.

As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close what might we consider the ten most important events in space exploration and discovery?