He recognized that modern aircraft were generally larger, heavier, and more difficult to move by road from one location to another. Future acquisitions, perhaps as large as a Boeing , would require covered display space and would need to travel there without being disassembled, trucked over miles of highway and then reassembled.
Such costs would be prohibitive except in the rarest of cases. This criterion narrowed the possibilities significantly. Dulles Airport seemed most logical, and after some perseverance, the Smithsonian Board of Regents endorsed the plan, and the Federal Aviation Administration offered acres of land to the south of the airport for the construction of the Dulles Annex, but that was just the beginning.
The future companion facility, known at first as the Dulles Annex, would be the largest construction project in Smithsonian history, and the only Smithsonian museum building to be constructed entirely with private funds.
The space shuttle Discovery is the centerpiece of the James S. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. The annex was renamed the Steven F. It was an extremely cold winter day, but the parking lot was full and the lines were long. In the first two weeks, the Center welcomed more than , visitors and an additional half million came in the next three months.
It quickly became the most-visited museum in Virginia, with an average of one million visitors a year. The Center features two massive hangars. I do it for a living. Seven continents. Dozens of countries. Up mountains. Under water. And a bunch of places in between. Based in Washington DC. Photos by David Coleman. Please contact me for licensing images. Images are registered with the U. Copyright Office. By David Coleman. Last Updated: September 21, Visitors can take an elevator up into this observation tower.
In , Goddard tried to demonstrate the possibilities of such a rocket in Roswell, N. A technical glitch prevented its launch that day but Lindbergh made sure the foot rocket would be donated to the Smithsonian.
It became the first liquid-fuel rocket in the collection. Early rocketry could be surprisingly primitive, as seen in the jerry-rigged two-foot wooden sled Robert F.
Goddard devised in the early s to convey flasks of super-cold liquid oxygen that were much too chilly to touch. Goddard had first started experimenting with solid propellant rockets in , switching to more powerful liquid propellants in One of the smallest items at the Udvar-Hazy Center is the carcass of a Cross spider named Anita , who, with a companion named Arabella, became involuntary space travelers on the Skylab 3 mission in They were there as part of an experiment to test how weightlessness affected their web building.
The idea came from a year-old student from Lexington, Massachusetts, Judith Miles , who responded to a NASA initiative for student experiment ideas. It turns out the arachnid astronauts spun webs in space using a finer thread in response to the weightless environment. Neither Anita nor Arabella survived the nearly two months in space. But they were placed in glass bottles with their names on them. Arabella is on loan to the U. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
As the lunar module of Apollo 11 was fast approaching its historic target on July 20, , it was also running low on propellant. Duke based his count on a handheld Swiss-made Heuer stopwatch. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. Without lights it looks more like a death star — a much smaller one. But the model, 63 inches round and 38 inches wide, is a surprising find in the Udvar-Hazy Center.
Conceived by Steven Spielberg but made by a team led by Gregory Jein, it was built using parts from model trains and other kits. There are not many items in the massive space and aviation collection that are as simply drawn and so brightly painted. But the six-inch, red plastic device had an important job: Showing where the capsules of the Mercury Project were at any time of their flights.
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