The 1909 Wright Military Flyer is the world's first military airplane. In 1908, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sought competitive bids for a two-seat observation aircraft. Winning designs had to meet a ...

Today, satellites are the battle fleet's keenest eyes. But during World War II, crews aboard lumbering flying boats provided distant, early warning of enemy ships and aircraft at sea. The Consolidated ...

In the spring of 1917, Britain's most famous World War I fighter, the Sopwith Camel, made its debut. Shortly after deliveries to front-line squadrons of the Camel began, Sopwith designed a new ...

See the Bell X-1, the first aircraft to break the sound barrier, in the same Hall as Friendship 7, NASA astronaut John Glenn’s spacecraft in which he became the first American to orbit the Earth. The ...

This successful effort did not go unnoticed by certain American and Japanese naval observers who began to visualize experimenting with specialized “airplane carrier” ships that could both launch and ...

Step outside of the Air and Space Museum and into the Lyle Tuttle Tattoo Art Collection in San Francisco, California to explore the symbolism of tattoo body art during World War II.

Today, the United States Air Force is retiring the Predator—a military unmanned aerial vehicle that was used in attacks against al Qaeda during the war on terrorism. The Museum’s Predator, on display ...

The Apollo program, which landed the first human on the Moon, ended in December 1972 with Apollo 17. Why did we stop?

When the National Air and Space Museum opened its doors in July 1976, it featured in its theater a film produced specifically for the Museum called To Fly in a large format called IMAX.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a major Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.

When the Apollo 17 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean 50 years ago, they were the last humans to visit the Moon. NASA’s Artemis program is set to return humans to the Moon, but not for two ...

In May 2017, a team of eight 3D scanning experts from the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office and collections staff from the National Air and Space Museum set out to capture a comprehensive 3D ...