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National Air and Space Museum

The Wright brothers’ airplane and the Apollo 11 capsule that came back from the Moon

Local name: National Air and Space Museum

Collection: Washington, D.C. · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The museum’s stone blocks on the National Mall
The museum’s stone blocks on the National Mall · Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. It is a row of plain stone blocks joined by glass halls. The museum opened on the first of July 1976, for the nation’s two hundredth anniversary, as a gift to the country. Inside are the most famous machines in the history of flight. Here is the Wright brothers’ Flyer. On the seventeenth of December 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, it made the first powered flights. The pilot was Orville Wright. The first flight lasted twelve seconds and covered 120 feet. For twenty years the Flyer was in London, at the Science Museum, and it returned to the United States only in 1948. It was given to the Smithsonian on the seventeenth of December 1948, exactly forty-five years after the first flights. Here too is the command module Columbia from Apollo 11. In July 1969 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins flew to the Moon in it. It is the only part of the spacecraft that came back to Earth. In 2018 the museum began a massive renovation of every gallery. The galleries were renewed in stages, and the museum reopened part by part. The renovation was completed in 2026, for the museum’s fiftieth anniversary.

Visiting

650 Jefferson Drive SW; everyone enters through the doors on Jefferson Drive, on the Mall side. Open daily, 10:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., except December 25. Admission is free, but everyone needs a free timed-entry pass, children included. Book on airandspace.si.edu, up to nine passes at a time; the pass does not limit how long you stay.

Photos

The original 1903 Wright Flyer
The original 1903 Wright Flyer · Vintage Fan 5678, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Apollo 11 command module Columbia
Apollo 11 command module Columbia · Smithsonian Institution/Eric Long, CC0, Wikimedia Commons

Sources

This text was written by AI from open sources. An expert will still check it. Found a mistake? Write to us. Support

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