On June 17, 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. Curiously, unlike every previous milestone in the "space race," this event did not spur NASA to catch up by ...

Soon, four astronauts will launch on a mission to the vicinity of the Moon for the first time in over 50 years. The mission, called Artemis II, is the second mission — and first crewed mission — of ...

People may know Artemis as NASA’s return-to-the-Moon program. However, it is much more than a rerun of Project Apollo. While the destination is the same, the goals are more ambitious. The program’s ...

These days, it takes seven hours to fly from New York to London, compared to under three hours flying at twice the speed of sound on the Concorde. When I started my internship at the National Air and ...

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 ...

One of the icons of the National Air and Space Museum’s location on the National Mall, before we began our massive renovation project, was the black-and-white German V-2 ballistic missile. Ever since ...

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project...will be ...

Picture the Earth from above. In your mind's eye, what do you see? Today, we have access to air and space technology that lets us see various views of the Earth with ease. However, before the ...

Marlon D. Green fought and won the right to fly as a pilot for a major United States airline—a triumph during a time when segregation often kept Black people out of what were at the time all-white ...

Kalpana Chawla, PhD, was an engineer, pilot, and astronaut who spent more than 30 days in space over two Space Shuttle missions. Chawla was born in Karnal, India, and was fascinated by flight since ...

Fifty years ago, on December 19, 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific. They were the last humans to visit the Moon—and the last to be more than 400 miles from the Earth. Since ...

At 10:35 a.m., on December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made history in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They made the first powered, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air flying machine. It was ...