The Thompson Brothers Balloon & Parachute Company was established in 1903 to manufacture balloons but they soon shifted to exhibition work, as manufacturing and sales became a sideline for the company ...

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is the most significant recent advance in navigation and positioning technology. In the past, the stars were used for navigation. Today's world requires greater ...

Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise were meant to be the third Apollo crew to journey to the Moon on a lunar landing mission. On April 11, 1970, the Apollo 13 astronauts launched from Kennedy ...

For long distance overseas flight, the flying boat was the obvious solution. As most of the world’s major cities lie along coastlines and have port facilities, expensive conventional airfields were ...

Support the Museum We rely on the generous support of donors, sponsors, members, and other benefactors to share the history and impact of aviation and spaceflight, educate the public, and inspire ...

When naval air strategists had crafted the requirements for the new fighter, the need for speed had overridden all other performance goals. With this in mind, the Bureau of Aeronautics selected the ...

The National Air and Space Museum's Teacher Innovator Institute (TII) will welcome up to 30 teachers from across the United States each summer. Teachers will remain with the program for two summers, ...

Wall of Honor profiles are provided by the honoree or the donor who added their name to the Wall of Honor. The Museum cannot validate all facts contained in the profiles.

Here is a map of stowage locations we were able to photograph last week. It is just below and to the right of the makeshift writing board described above. The diagram available to the Apollo 11 ...

Stardate 1604.01: At 12:01 am EDT this morning, the National Air and Space Museum began breeding tribbles. This bold, innovative, not-at-all-ill-advised experiment will run for 24 hours, until 11:59 ...

Nancy Love also recognized the coming need for pilots to ferry aircraft and identified highly qualified women pilots in the U.S. who could perform such duties. In September 1942, the Army Air Corps' ...

The beautiful, but skewed, spiral galaxy NGC 1961 is about 190 million light-years from Earth—in the constellation Camelopardalis. During Hubble’s era, astronomers debated whether such formations were ...