National Air and Space Museum

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum at 6th Street and Independence Avenue SW in Washington, DC is the most-visited museum in the United States, attracting millions of visitors annually to its collection of actual aircraft and spacecraft that defined the history of human flight. Free and open daily as part of the Smithsonian network, the flagship Mall building opened in July 1976 as part of the American Bicentennial celebrations and holds approximately 60 major artifacts in 20 themed galleries organized around the history of aviation and space exploration from the earliest experiments to the Space Age.

The milestones of aerospace history represented at the museum are displayed as authentic artifacts rather than replicas. The 1903 Wright Brothers Flyer, in which Orville Wright made the first successful powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903, hangs in the Milestones of Flight gallery. Nearby is Charles Lindbergh's Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis monoplane, in which he completed the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight between New York and Paris over 33.5 hours in May 1927. The Apollo 11 command module Columbia, which carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon and back in July 1969, is among the most significant objects in any American museum collection.

John Glenn's Mercury capsule Friendship 7 — in which Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth on February 20, 1962 — is displayed alongside the capsule's original telemetry data. One of the museum's most memorable tactile exhibits is an Apollo 17 lunar sample rock from 1972, mounted in the Exploring the Moon gallery and available for visitors to touch — one of only a small number of publicly accessible Moon rocks in the world.

The museum's companion facility, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia, houses larger artifacts including the Space Shuttle Discovery, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft, and an Air France Concorde. The Mall building completed a major renovation between 2022 and 2026 introducing updated galleries including One World Connected on commercial aviation and a refreshed Milestones of Flight hall. The Einstein Planetarium on-site offers immersive dome films on space exploration for a separate admission fee.