The RTX Living in the Space Age Hall will provide insight into space technologies and infrastructure that are largely invisible to the public but have a profound impact on our daily lives. The ...

He was selected to be the STS-28 Payload Communicator and successfully led the deployment of the second DoD shuttle payload in 1989. He contributed to a Charles Stark Draper Laboratory patent on ...

U.S. Navy test pilot Alan Shepard joined the astronaut program in 1959. He became the first American and the second man in space on May 5, 1961, when he piloted the Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7 on a ...

Realizing the need for a higher-powered engine, Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney Aircraft worked together on a centrifugal-flow turbojet engine with a 30 percent power increase and no significant ...

Command Module Handbag Telling the story of the the Apollo 11 lunar landing includes some of the unique pieces of memorabilia created to mark that human achievement. In addition to the pins, patches, ...

Scope and Contents The Carl H. Claudy Photography Collection, held by the Archives Division of the National Air and Space Museum, consists of 249 glass plate negatives, mainly 4 x 5 inches in size, ...

The Space Race grew out of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the most powerful countries after World War II. For a half-century, the two superpowers competed for supremacy ...

In the 1960s during the race to the Moon, the Soviets began to build hardware that in the 1970s became the world's first space station. On April 19, 1971, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first ...

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has captured dramatic landscapes of the Moon since it was first launched in 2009. A New Moon Rises showcased those breathtaking images from Apollo ...

The Big Three As the civil airplane progressed from experimental designs to practical transportation, three U.S. aircraft companies formed the backbone of general aviation aircraft: Beechcraft, Cessna ...

In 1941, a new air base at Tuskegee, Alabama, became the center for the training program of Black air personnel. First with the 99th Fighter Squadron and later with the 332nd Fighter Group, African ...

During World War II the Japanese constructed nearly 10,000 lighter-than-air balloons for the purpose of carrying destructive pay loads to the U.S. Between November 1944 and April 1945 these balloons ...