Visit us in Washington, DC and Chantilly, VA to explore hundreds of the world’s most significant objects in aviation and space history. Free timed-entry passes are required for the Museum in DC.

How Lockheed's P-3 kept the Cold War from turning hot. Submarines are hard to kill. For military strategists, no warship generates as much uncertainty and trepidation as an adversary that can prowl ...

To end the brutality of World War I combat, military strategists looked to the skies for victory. World War I airplanes that can still fly are a rarity. In the United States, in fact, only a handful ...

Maj. Richard Heyser had been sitting 14 miles above the Earth for 5 hours. Soaring at the edge of space, he flew from northern California, around the Gulf of Mexico, and approached the small island of ...

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project...will be ...

Picture the Earth from above. In your mind's eye, what do you see? Today, we have access to air and space technology that lets us see various views of the Earth with ease. However, before the ...

Joseph Kittinger traveled to the edge of space—and jumped. On August 16, 1960, Joe Kittinger went for a balloon ride. Sitting inside an open gondola suspended from an enormous helium-filled envelope, ...

Marlon D. Green fought and won the right to fly as a pilot for a major United States airline—a triumph during a time when segregation often kept Black people out of what were at the time all-white ...

Fifty years ago, on December 19, 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific. They were the last humans to visit the Moon—and the last to be more than 400 miles from the Earth. Since ...

The Saturn V rocket, the launch vehicle for the Apollo lunar missions in the 1960s and 1970s, remains the largest and heaviest rocket ever successfully launched. It stood 363 feet tall (taller than ...

Think you’ve checked the National Air and Space Museum off of your must-see list? Think again. We have just opened brand-new exhibitions at our location on the National Mall in Washington, DC, that ...

On October 14, 1947, the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis, piloted by U.S. Air Force Captain Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, became the first airplane to fly faster than the speed of sound (Mach 1). The ...