According to the people that track these things, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. was the third most visited museum in the world in 2012 after the Louvre and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. When I went on one of the docent tours, the guide pointed out that sometimes during the busy season the museum is so crowded it’s hard to move around. It has to be considered one of the must-see places to see in DC.
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| National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC |
Walking into the museum from the Mall side, the grand hall is impressive. It’s a huge room with aircraft hanging from the ceiling, spacecraft spread out around the floor and several tall rockets on one side wall. It’s called the Milestones of Flight exhibit and has many important historic airplanes and spacecraft.
On the floor level are the Mercury Friendship 7, John Glenn’s capsule, Gemini IV, from which Edward White II took the first American spacewalk and the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia that carried Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins on their voyage to the moon in 1969. There’s also a piece of moon rock that visitors are encouraged to touch that came from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Hanging from the ceiling are the first plane to fly faster than the speed of sound, the Bell X-1, the North American X-15 and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. There is some recognition of the Soviet Union’s early accomplishments in space flight; a replica of the Sputnik I hangs almost in the middle of the large atrium. Along the wall are two Cold War artifacts, a Soviet SS-20 and Pershing-II missile.
From a historical point of view the museums most important holding is probably the 1903 Wright Flyer, “the first heavier-than-air, powered aircraft to make a sustained controlled flight with a pilot aboard.” There’s an exhibit area with the plane and reproductions of the kite and gliders the Wright’s built to help them study the principals of flight that would lead to their remarkable invention. Nearby is the Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery that has the first planes to complete a transcontinental flight, an around the world flight and the bright red Lockheed 5B Vega that Amelia Earhart flew solo across the Atlantic in 1932.
At one end of the museum is an exhibit of six military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) built during the last twenty years that point to one area of aviation that will likely see lots of future development. And for sci-fi fans, in the back of the lower level of the gift shop is the 11 foot model of the starship Enterpise used in filming the original Star Trek television series.
There are twenty-one exhibit galleries, including ones on space travel, the planets, the world wars, sea-air operations, commercial aviation and much more, so if you wanted to really take it all in, you could easily spend a whole day in the museum. There’s a large food court and one end, a planetarium, IMAX theater, simulator rides and a large gift shop. So there’s lots to see and do for everyone in the family, including kids.
The companion museum in Northern Virginia called the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy opened in 2003 and it’s bigger than the DC location.
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