The National Air and Space Museum (NASM) of the Smithsonian Institution is a museum in Washington, D.C., United States, dedicated to human flight and space exploration. Established in 1946 as the National Air Museum, its main building opened on the National Mall near L'Enfant Plaza in 1976. In 2023, the museum welcomed 3.1 million visitors, making it the fourth-most visited museum in the United States and eleventh-most in the world. The museum is a center for research into the history and science of aviation and spaceflight, as well as planetary science and terrestrial geology and geophysics. Almost all of its spacecraft and aircraft on display are original primary or backup craft (rather than facsimiles). Its collection includes the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia, the Friendship 7 capsule which was flown by John Glenn, Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, the model of the starship Enterprise used in the science fiction television show Star Trek: The Original Series, and the Wright brothers' Wright Flyer airplane near the entrance. The museum operates a 760,000-square-foot (71,000 m2) annex, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, at Dulles International Airport. It includes the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar, which houses the museum's restoration and archival activities. Other preservation and restoration efforts take place at the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility in Suitland, Maryland. The museum's National Mall building is undergoing a $360-million renovation that started in 2018. As of August 2024, 13 of the museum's galleries were open to the public, with the other 10 expected to reopen by 2026.
History
National Air Museum The Air and Space Museum was originally called the National Air Museum when formed on August 12, 1946, by an act of Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. Some pieces in the National Air and Space Museum collection date back to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia after which the Chinese Imperial Commission donated a group of kites to the Smithsonian after Smithsonian Secretary Spencer Fullerton Baird convinced exhibiters that shipping them home would be too costly. The Stringfellow steam engine intended for aircraft was added to the collection in 1989, the first piece actively acquired by the Smithsonian now in the current NASM collection.
After the establishment of the museum, there was no one building that could hold all the items to be displayed, many obtained from the United States Army and United States Navy collections of domestic and captured aircraft from World War I. Some pieces were on display in the Arts and Industries Building, some were stored in the Aircraft Building (also known as the "Tin Shed"), a large temporary metal shed in the Smithsonian Castle's south yard. Larger missiles and rockets were displayed outdoors in what was known as Rocket Row. The shed housed a large Martin bomber, a LePere fighter-bomber, and an Aeromarine 39B floatplane. Still, much of the collection remained in storage due to a lack of display space. The combination of the large numbers of aircraft donated to the Smithsonian after World War II and the need for hangar and factory space for the Korean War drove the Smithsonian to look for its own facility to store and restore aircraft. The current Garber Facility was ceded to the Smithsonian by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission in 1952 after the curator Paul E. Garber spotted the wooded area from the air. Bulldozers from Fort Belvoir and prefabricated buildings from the United States Navy kept the initial costs low.
Construction of current building
The museum's prominent site on the National Mall once housed the city's armory, which became Armory Square Hospital during the Civil War; it nursed the worst wounded cases who were transported to Washington after battles. The rest of the site was occupied by a cluster of temporary war buildings that existed from World War I until the 1960s. The space race in the 1950s and 1960s led to the renaming of the museum to the National Air and Space Museum, and finally congressional passage of appropriations for the construction of the new exhibition hall, which opened July 1, 1976, at the height of the United States Bicentennial festivities under the leadership of Director Michael Collins, who had flown to the Moon on Apollo 11.
Later history In 1988, a glass-enclosed pavilion named the Wright Place was constructed and opened at the east end of the museum. It contained a restaurant known as Flight Lane, but the restaurant closed in 2001 and reopened as a food court on May 24, 2002, with McDonald's (later added with a McCafé), Boston Market, and Donato's Pizza serving as the tenants. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center opened on December 15, 2003, funded by a private donation. The museum received COSTAR, the corrective optics instrument installed in the Hubble Space Telescope during its first servicing mission (STS-61), when it was removed and returned to Earth after Space Shuttle mission STS-125. The museum also holds the backup mirror for the Hubble which, unlike the one that was launched, was ground to the correct shape. There were once plans for it to be installed to the Hubble itself, but plans to return the satellite to Earth were scrapped after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003; the mission was re-considered as too risky. In 2018, the museum received Schmitt Space Communicator, the device with the on-flight internet connection launched by Solstar on a New Shepard rocket to send the first tweet from space. The Smithsonian has also been promised the International Cometary Explorer, which is currently in a solar orbit that occasionally brings it back to Earth, should NASA attempt to recover it.
Architecture
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