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 ...

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. The ...

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. In ...

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 ...

Explore the stories of innovative individuals who contributed to early flight at the National Air and Space Museum.

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 ...

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 ...

Not Yet a Moon Shot Before Kennedy’s call to send a man to the Moon, the early years of the Space Race marked successes through headline making “firsts”: the first satellite, the first man in space, ...

Alan Shepard became the first American and the second man in space on May 5, 1961, when he piloted the Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7 on a 490-kilometer (300-mile), 15-minute suborbital flight.

The 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, the only unit that stormed the beach at Normandy on June 6, 1944, that was comprised entirely of African American soldiers, played a vital role in protecting the ...