Few astronauts were as famous as Jim Lovell—Tom Hanks played him in the 1995 movie Apollo 13. Lovell commanded that ill-fated space mission, which did not land on the Moon in 1970 because an ...

If you are traveling somewhere new, you are more than likely going to need some form of map to get there. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave the United States a mandate: Before the decade was out ...

A century ago, Edwin Hubble began the race to the edge of the cosmos. On a snowy New Year’s afternoon in 1925, on the campus of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., astronomer Henry ...

After decades of service, a legendary tanker says farewell. I’m seated in the tail of a U.S. Air Force KC-10 that is climbing to 25,000 feet somewhere over Big Sur. Looking out from the boom ...

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.

Donald Ray Kuhns was born on February 21, 1934 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. After graduating from high school in 1951, he attended the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics where he attained his AE ...

Michael López-Alegría, also known as “L-A,” is one of America’s most experienced astronauts. He has completed six space missions so far and commanded three of them, spending 296 days (about 9 and a ...

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. For ...

When NASA astronaut Ellison Onizuka rode Space Shuttle Discovery into space on shuttle mission STS-51-C in 1985, he made history on several counts. He was the first Asian American astronaut, the first ...

There’s a reason you don’t know the names of the first American women to fly combat missions. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower tore through the waters of the Persian Gulf on November 15, 1994. On the ...

The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center had a birthday party—and everyone was invited. Twenty years ago this past December, the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, ...

Our night sky is full of wonders. When you look up you can see the stars, the Moon, and sometimes even other planets! We know what these otherworldly objects are because of centuries of research ...