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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Who Flew? Flying was very expensive. Only business travelers and the wealthy could afford to fly. Most people still rode trains or buses for intercity travel because flying was so expensive. A ...

The U.S. military began experimenting with unmanned aircraft as early as World War I. By World War II, unmanned craft could be controlled by radio signals, usually from another aircraft. Vehicles that ...

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 ...

When President Kennedy proclaimed that Americans would put a human on the Moon by the end of the decade, there wasn't a rocket that could get someone there. The engineering feat of the Saturn V rocket ...