All Stories

The story of NASM's three-foot-tall doll wearing a scaled-down copy of the real Mercury spacesuit. 

The touching story behind a 1960s charm bracelet.

Are you a lover of all things lunar? Here are three hidden gems from the Destination Moon exhibit you won’t want to miss.  

In the late 1950s, he United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a competition for global influence and prestige—the Cold War—and began to compete on a new frontier: space. Both nations started programs to send humans into space. In the United States, that program was Project Mercury.  

If you've heard the famous line "Houston, we've had a problem," you may be wondering: just who exactly is Houston?

To tell the story of the first American in space, the Museum has conserved and digitized the Mercury suit Alan Shepard wore during the first American human spaceflight in 1961. The suit will be displayed in the new Destination Moon exhibition.

When John Glenn splashed down at the end of his planned three-orbit mission, he became a national hero because he was the first American to orbit the Earth. Celebrate the 60th anniversary of Glenn’s historic spaceflight by learning about the origin of the seven-orbit myth.

As we ring in 2022, we celebrate the friends that make the National Air and Space Museum so special.

Space history curator Michael Neufeld tells the story of Gus Grissom's suborbital flight in July 1961 and the blown hatch that resulted in the sinking of his Mercury capsule.

On May 5, 1961, a Redstone rocket hurled Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule, Freedom 7, 116 miles high and 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Freedom 7 parachuted into the Atlantic just 15 minutes and 22 seconds later, after attaining a maximum velocity of 5,180 mph. Shepard, a Navy test pilot and NASA astronaut, became the first American to fly in space.