National Air & Space Museum: The Best Free Museum on This or Any Other Planet
Written: Jul 14 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: free, amazing collection of space artifacts, mix of science, engineering, and focus on human achievement
Cons: close upstairs 15 minutes early, Skylab not worth the wait, How Things Fly needs updating
The Bottom Line: The National Air & Space Museum is quite simply one of the most spectacular museums on the planet and one of my very favorite places to visit.
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| quasar's Full Review: National Air & Space Museum |
I got the best 21st birthday present from my parents: a three day weekend trip to the Baltimore/Washington area with my dad where I got to select the entire itinerary. No sisters wanting to go to stupid places I couldn't care less about (okay, that I cared a lot less about than the places I wanted to go...there are very few places in either Baltimore or Washington I don't like).
It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that our trip consisted of day long visits to the Maryland Science Center, the National Air & Space Museum, and the Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt, MD.
I regret to say that that trip was my last to either Baltimore or Washington until this past summer, a full ten years later. Although I didn't get the chance to return to Goddard, you better believe I went back to both the Maryland Science Center and the National Air & Space Museum. While the Maryland Science Center had gone downhill a bit since my last visit, Air & Space was just as marvelous as always. It's one of my very favorite places on the planet, a place I can conjure up at will in my memories even when I haven't visited in a while. Actually being there is practically orgasmic.
Although there were new exhibits and some minor updating in certain areas, the bulk of the Air & Space Museum remains exactly the way I remember it from my childhood. One wing concentrates mainly on airplanes and one on space travel, with an extensive series of space artifacts including the only remaining piece of Sputnik, the backup Skylab orbital workshop, an unused lunar module from the Apollo program, and Friendship 7 (John Glenn's Mercury capsule). Friendship 7 is part of the "Milestones of Flight" exhibit that displays the finest collection of aviation artifacts ever assembled in, around, and above the main atrium of the museum. Some of the other craft on display here include Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, Chuck Yeager's Glamorous Glennis, Explorer I, and the Apollo 11 command module. Although amazing for its historical significance, the real impact of this collection is visual; the varying geometric shapes are stunning even from the partially blocked view as you glance through the glass walls from outside. From inside as you walk around and under the sights are so impressive it's hard to take in; everywhere you look is something unique and interesting even before you process that what you're actually viewing was the first plane to break the sound barrier or a test model of the very first machine to land on Mars. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.
In general, there was a lot more information on the Russian Space Program on this visit compared to past visits (which makes sense given the state of the world then vs. now). A new exhibit weaves its way around and alongside the large atrium section just to the left of the Milestones exhibit (facing into the museum). An exploration of the Space Race concentrating on comparing and contrasting the American and Russian way of doing things, the exhibit is one of the meatiest in the museum. They highlighted some of the key players in the Soviet Cosmonaut program both behind the scenes and in the air and presented some impressive artifacts. In keeping with the comparison theme, most artifacts are presented in pairs, one Russian and one American. For instance, a Yuri Gagarin test flight suit is presented near the suit actually worn by John Glenn during his 1962 flight and Aleksi Leonov's flight test suit is positioned near Dave Scott's Apollo 15 suit which still has moondust on it. The only remaining piece of Sputnik is presented here as well.
Still part of the Space Race exhibit but set separately directly underneath the scale model of a docked Apollo-Soyuz hanging from the ceiling is an interesting exhibit on the use of spacecraft for spying and reconnaissance. In particular, the methods used to recover film before the advent of digital photography were fascinating. This section relied fairly heavily on films which slowed things down a bit and got a little boring compared to the more standard static presentations. This area also had a series of smaller exhibits in open areas that blend together a bit. Scattered around are exhibits on the Soviet Lunar program, how folks live in space with some focus on recreation, and a few other things.
The last section of the Space Race exhibit deals with the more permanent presence in space of recent times. This section doesn't really feel like it belongs in the Space Race exhibit which otherwise deals mainly with competition between the Americans and Soviets, possibly because much of the older material predates the exhibit. That said, it's a wonderful addition to the museum containing a lot of information about the space shuttle and a test model of the Hubble telescope. The Skylab backup orbital laboratory is technically part of this exhibit as well although it feels separated not in small part because the entryway to view the inside areas is on the second floor while the rest of this exhibit is on the first floor of the museum (in an open area that extends upward to the inside of the roof of the building).
Skylab is always busy. It's one of the few exhibits where you'll have to wait for a viewing spot; the line was lengthy every time I passed the entrance area all day on this last visit and I remember long waits in the past as well. Personally, I find it one of the more disappointing artifacts in the museum. The housing itself is impressive but the quick glance you get at the glass encased instrumentation is hardly worth the wait and the wax models placed around the lab are so obviously fake they distract from the little available for public viewing.
Another favorite is the Rocketry and Space Flight gallery which concentrates on the evolution of rockets and space suits both real and fictional. It combines actual artifacts with technical drawings and speculative art. I particularly liked an oil painting by Robert T. McCall called "Inside the Spaceship Discovery" based on 2001: A Space Odyssey. The museum as a whole has a lot of space art, but other than the spectacular mural near the entrance opposite the mall-side entrance and one other piece mentioned later in the review the best pieces are found here.
One of the more interesting factual exhibits illustrates the step by step process for donning an Apollo EVA suit including information on the purpose of each layer of the suit. There were also side by side by side comparisons of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space suits and a look at spacesuits in science fiction.
Similarly, a section of this gallery is devoted to examining the various components of rockets and their purpose. This is immediately followed by a timeline of the history of rockets starting with medieval weapons then progressing through the centuries from the 17th. There's a lot of background information presented here as well as artifacts like old launchers, telescopes, and rockets.
This gallery also has a section on the rocket societies of the 20s and 30s, dreams of space flight through the ages and famous hoaxes. Interestingly, the most infamous space hoax of all, the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds is not mentioned. These sections humanize the quest for space, really tie the hardware together with the people who dreamed about it and made it a reality.
The other large spaceflight gallery is upstairs, Apollo to the Moon. It has a long detailed timeline of spaceflight along the first several walls and plays Kennedy's famous speech on a continuous loop. This area also has Apollo fuel cells, a mockup of the cockpit of an Apollo module, and all sorts of equipment and tools used by astronauts including operations manuals, star charts, tools for in-flight maintenance, all sorts of tools to take samples with, and even exercise equipment. Most of the tools and equipment are on one long wall; it's a bit visually overwhelming and there isn't room to provide much information on individual items. There's also a cute animated movie where the man in the moon tells about apollo 11 from his perspective and a display on moon rocks that doesn't do much for me.
My favorite room in the entire museum is found near the end of this gallery. Three sides are lined with dates and mission descriptions with astronaut photographs of every US manned space mission from Mercury through Apollo. There are also replicas of the plaques left on the moon by each LEM crew and photographs taken during each mission. This is a trivia lovers mecca, with lots of interesting tidbits about each mission and astronaut. Among many other things you'll find a copy of the last words spoken on the moon by Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan:
"As we leave the moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and God willing we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind."
But this all pales in comparison to the fourth wall, the glass wall facing the main exhibit hall. I call it the shrine to the dead astronauts. The center panel has photographs of Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee with this quote from Grissom:
"If we die we want people to accept it and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
It makes me cry every time. In addition to visiting as I progress through the museum the last thing I do before I leave the museum is go back and pay my respects. I'd like to see similar rooms for the space shuttle missions and for the Russian space program but understand that the larger scope of both programs would make that difficult. Too many people have flown in the space shuttles to make individualized mission reports and photographs feasible, but a computerized display would perhaps be appropriate as would the addition of a permanent remembrance of the Challenger and Columbia astronauts and the four cosmonauts who died during missions.
I admit that I always concentrate on the space and astronomy galleries, fitting in whatever aviation exhibits I have time for but making sure that those things I don't have time to see all revolve around airplanes. It's not that I'm not interested in these galleries but rather that my interest in the other galleries is greater. On my most recent visit I managed to explore three of the flight galleries: Early Flight, The Golden Age of Flight, and Jet Aviation. Oddly, the Jet Aviation gallery was physically placed between the other two galleries even though it fell after both chronologically.
Early Flight recreates the feel of a 1910s airshow. This gallery is almost unchanged from my previous visits. It has lots of old aircraft, dim lighting to simulate gas lamps, and plays old music. It examines the engines, pilots, and the differences between different nations and highlights the history of the airshow including a list of early shows.
The Golden Age of Flight covers the period between the two World Wars. It concentrates on records, prizes, and exhibitions. My favorite parts of this exhibit are the caricatures of many aviators of the time. They're presented much like Ripley cartoon with associated text proclaiming their exciting feats. They were really cool. There were also a lot of recreations of vintage newspapers and engines from the 1920s. Perhaps the most interesting display covered how the legislation of the time helped grow the aviation industry.
The Jet Aviation gallery was a bit piecemeal. It displays a gas turbine engine and engine cross sections but is oriented more toward straight informational exhibits than the other airplane galleries I visited. It covers elements of aircraft design, flight controls and how wings are adjusted, how planes brake, the evolution of instrumentation, and using computers to design planes. It also has a timeline of milestones in aviation history with very short entries and a focus on the people rather than the hardware. It also compares early jets from different countries.
This gallery also had a very funny short movie starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coco called Sneaking Through the Sound Barrier. Although I enjoyed watching it, there were enough factual inaccuracies in the movie to make me wish it wasn't presented here.
There are several exhibits that aren't focused on either Aviation or Space Flight but rather follow a particular element that affect both. The first one was called Looking at Earth and it examined how we monitor Earth from the air. It looked at satellite photography to monitor weather, changes to land masses, and to photograph the Earth. It looked at different satellites and examined the history of aerial photography including more information on spy photography and the role of aerial photography in World War II and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Beyond the Limits is another crossover exhibit that covers both aviation and space flight. It explores how the advent of computers changed flight. It has a short but nice history of computing devices and the type of tasks needed to improve flight design as well as a design your own plane simulation to see if you were paying attention.
In addition to a display on the math of flight complete with Navier-Stokes equations, they had a Friden STW-10 calculator used for stress analysis in the 1950s. I found this rather large device fascinating as I'd never seen one before.
Perhaps the most interesting section of this gallery dealt with flight testing and safety including the use of simulators and information on how computers have changed air traffic control.
There were also explicit sections dealing with space flight including artifacts like a Saturn rocket launch circuit board and a Mercury guidance system as well as information on electric countdowns and videos on the use of computers for launching unmanned and manned craft. The videos were long and slow to start but fairly interesting. The other information was pretty boring and self-evident although the artifacts were cool.
Parts of this gallery didn't seem to quite fit the stated theme. For instance, information about wind tunnels and GPS devices seemed out of place. In retrospect, GPS is a logical topic to discuss under the computers in flight theme but the actual presentation of the subject felt out of place.
So far this review has concentrated on the engineering and hardware aspects of aviation and space flight and the people involved with them. There are also three large galleries covering the related science.
How Things Fly explores the science of flight including things like air pressure, lift, drag, the shape of wings, and fluid dynamics. After looking at the science of atmospheric flight, the exhibit moves on to space flight with an examination of gravity. Some of the topics covered include gravity in orbit, why orbiting space craft don't fall, and Kepler's Laws. Most of this is informational but there is an experiment on a nearly frictionless air track that illustrates Newton's Laws of Motion. The exhibit also includes the ubiquitous scales to weight yourself on other planets and spends time discussing the importance of new materials to making space craft.
Although this exhibit had definitely been updated between my visits, it still was a bit worn down and suffering from age pains. The computerized gravitation exhibit uses old screens with very small blocky text, a composite of points to make graphics, and a very few very faded colors. In addition a lot of the exhibit text is very high up or behind protruding objects so it can be very difficult to see.
Exploring the Planets has been at the museum as long as I've been visiting and it looks very much as it always has with only a few minor adjustments. It covers our solar system in some detail including a historical look at how mankind has thought about the planets through the years and the tools used for planetary exploration.
The bulk of the gallery is an examination of the planets one at a time complete with pictures, statistics, information on probes, and a look at how our understanding of the planet has changed over time. The Mars display has been expanded and now includes a lot of information about the Viking lander. The outer planets have smaller simpler exhibits but some of their larger moons have separate panels with similar information.
The biggest addition to this gallery is a small room that plays an inane song to teach about the planets. Set to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell" I really didn't care for this song at all. They'd have been much better off using the Schoolhouse Rock song "Interplanet Janet".
There are also displays on the asteroids and comets. The asteroids have my favorite panel in this room. It includes a bunch of beautiful asteroid resonance patterns that look like spirograph designs. In contrast, the comet panel is deadly boring. It's mostly textual with a focus on how we observed Halley's Comet in 1986.
In addition to the individual information on planets, there is an area that compares the planets concentrating mostly on surface features like circumference and orbit length.
There were also some computer kiosks with information and quizzes related to the solar system but they were difficult to use. They had a non-intuitive interface and were very slow so it was easy to get impatient and press buttons too many times. Unfortunately there's no easy way to back up so even a single extra press could ruin a quiz.
The last scientific exhibit is the most extensive. It's also the newest. Explore the Universe looks at astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology more generally with some focus on the tools of the trade used both currently and in the past. There were several pre-telescope observational tools including a quadrant, an astrolabe, and an armillary sphere. The armillary sphere was particularly interesting as I'd never heard of it before let alone seen one.
The telescope information is sizable, starting with Galileo's first telescopes. This section included information on the common optic configurations of telescopes and spent a lot of time discussing William Herschel's view of the universe and his attempt to map the Milky Way galaxy. Accompanying this discussion is Herschel's 20 foot reflector. Herschel spent a lot of time building telescopes and refining their design. This scope was his favorite. It's enormous and truly impressive, particularly considering it was built in the 18th century without the help of modern tools.
The roles of photography and spectroscopy in astronomy are also explored in depth and here too the museum has an amazing artifact - the observation cage of the Mount Wilson 100 inch telescope used by Edwin Hubble in the 1920s and 1930s. This is accompanied by a brief history of the study of nebulae using different approaches and different observational methods.
Even with all of this instrumentation, the focus of this gallery is much more straight science than other museum galleries. The spectroscopy section, for example, concentrates on the discovery of redshift and the proof that the universe is expanding. The hardware is displayed to show how the discoveries were made rather than solely as interesting historical objects (as they might have been in other galleries in the museum).
The last major section of this gallery concentrates on the use of digital technology in astronomy. It starts with the basics - the electromagnetic spectrum - and presents a great analogy to help you understand just how little light we can actually see. It presents light as a piano keyboard with visible light covering one octave. The entire electromagnetic spectrum is 65 octaves.
One of the more interesting and fun displays in this area discusses how light is a time machine; objects are so far away that the light you see from them is many years old. They attach this discussion to the idea of a birth star - a star whose currently visible light left its origin when you were born. Mine was Delta Eridani. They also have a database that tells you what space or astronomy events happened around the time you were born, but this was less interesting.
This section had a lot of small displays highlighting individual experiments and the science they're trying to prove. For instance, a discussion of the big bang theory, the search for evidence it happened, and cosmic microwave background radiation is accompanied by a look at the COBE project and an investigation of dark matter and neutrinos is accompanied by information on the Chandra X-Ray Telescope used to look for evidence of the existence of dark matter. A beautiful mural ties this all together by presenting a timeline of modern observational equipment like COBE and the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT).
This is also where you'll find a Hubble Telescope backup mirror, an explanation of what went wrong with Hubble, and how it was fixed. There are also a few throwaway exhibits at the end of the gallery including a very fast bare boned computer exhibit on gravitational lenses that did not do them justice and a crowded and superficial "questions about the universe" section that posed questions like how old the universe is, how big it is, whether it has an edge, and whether it has a center.
The very last thing found in the gallery is a three minute clip of Scott Hamilton skating to "Galaxy Song" by Eric Idle. It's badly digitized on top of poor quality astronomical pictures. The entire thing seems gratuitous to me and a rather poor way to end an otherwise exceptional exhibit.
I spent the entire day at the museum without breaking for lunch. I did spend about 30 minutes in the gift shop but otherwise I was making my way through the exhibits. I still missed most of the upstairs aviation exhibits. It's not possible to see the entire museum in one day unless you rush through like a maniac or don't read much of anything. Fatigue also becomes a factor; the museum is large and there's a lot of walking. Fortunately benches are plentiful within most of the galleries (but surprisingly sparse in the hallways connecting galleries). There are also several water fountains located near the restrooms on each wing on each floor if dry throats become an issue.
The Air & Space Museum has one of the best gift shops around. It's worth pulling away from the galleries a few minutes before closing time to explore the store. Be aware that it's actually two floors, starting on the first floor of the museum and going downward into the basement. Most clearance merchandise, many of the books, and most of the collectibles can be found downstairs while exhibit-specific merchandise, tchotchkes, and some of the more eye-grabbing books are upstairs. Basically the most popular merchandise is upstairs because they don't expect many people to bother going downstairs.
Like most Smithsonian museums, admission to the Air & Space Museum is free. However, the museum also offers rides in flight simulators, planetarium shows, and IMAX shows for a fee. I've never done any of these things as I'm always pressed for time. The only one that appeals is the planetarium show (IMAX makes me dizzy) but I figure I can see a planetarium show whenever I want but I can't see the exhibits unless I'm in Washington.
I mentioned above that I like to return to the shrine of the dead astronauts just before I leave the museum to pay my respects. Unfortunately, for some reason they closed the upstairs galleries 15 minutes before the museum proper closed the day I visited. This was unannounced and almost prevented me from fulfilling this ritual on my last visit. As it was, instead of my more usual few minutes of somber contemplation I only managed a very quick flyby before the guard kicked me out. I felt somewhat cheated.
Even with this annoyance and the other few nits I pointed out along the way, I had a fabulous time at the National Air & Space Museum. I always do. It's quite simply one of the most spectacular museums on the planet and one of my very favorite places to visit. Most of the time I have to limit myself to memories, but whenever I have the opportunity to go for real I grab it. It was the first thing I did on my last trip to Washington and it will probably be the first thing I do on every other trip to Washington I ever take. Make sure you do it too.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Time to Travel Here: Anytime
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