National Air and Space Museum

Cold War to the present: the F-86 Sabre, the Bell UH-1H 'Huey' and the MQ-1L Predator anchor a gallery on how aviation reshaped military power and geopolitics. Opens 11 November 2026.

Nearly 50 hands-on interactives, a walk-in wind tunnel and a Cessna Skyhawk you can climb into explain how lift, weight, drag and thrust shape everything that flies.

The museum's grand entrance hall, reopened July 2025: Bell X-1 'Glamorous Glennis', Glenn's Friendship 7, SpaceShipOne, the X-15 and Apollo Lunar Module 2 under one roof.

Aviation at the centre of the twentieth century's largest conflict: the P-51D Mustang, a rare Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik, the Bf 109 G-6, and the tools used by camp labourers to build V-2 rockets.

General aviation's breadth and reach: sport, business and humanitarian flying, and the range of careers it supports, told through aircraft like the Lear Jet 23 and Cirrus SR22.

Who decides who goes to space, why we go, and what happens once we're there: emerging technology for commercial spaceflight, robotic exploration and human habitation beyond Earth.

How the airplane became an essential weapon of the First World War, with aircraft including the Sopwith Camel and Fokker D.VII and an immersive projection of open-cockpit aerial combat.

Aviation's golden age of the 1920s and '30s in an art-deco-styled gallery, pairing iconic aircraft with the personal stories of the pioneers who flew them.

How aviation and spaceflight remade Earth into an interconnected world, told through satellites and the technologies that link daily life across the globe.

Apollo 11's command module Columbia, Neil Armstrong's spacesuit, Alan Shepard's Mercury capsule and a Saturn V F-1 engine tell how humans reached the Moon — and why we are going back.

Skylab's orbital workshop, launch vehicles and satellite technology reveal the largely invisible space infrastructure that shapes daily life on Earth.

An immersive, highly interactive gallery tracing 40-plus years of learning to live and work in orbit, from the Space Shuttle and Space Station programmes to what comes next. Opens 30 October 2026.

Over 75 works from the Museum's art collection — Goya, Man Ray, Norman Rockwell, Alma Thomas, Annie Leibovitz — on the experience of flight. Ground floor of the new Flight and the Arts Center.

Humanity's pursuit of speed on land, sea, air and space, and how the chase for velocity shaped American commerce, power and prestige — with Mario Andretti's Indy 500-winning car among the icons on view.

How ever more precise instruments rewrote our picture of the cosmos, from the Hubble Space Telescope to the spectrograph Vera Rubin used to find the first evidence of dark matter.