“Despite taking place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars introduced generations of fans here on Earth to outer space as a setting for adventure and exploration,” said Margaret ...

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?

Seventy-five years ago, U.S. Air Force Captain Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager piloted the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis to become the first airplane to fly faster than the speed of sound (Mach 1).

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.

Heyser’s flight that day, October 14, 1962, revealed that the Soviet Union had begun building launch sites for nuclear missiles about 100 miles off the coast of Florida and was protecting those sites ...