A compilation of videos I took during my last visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. There are two museum – the main one being in Washington DC and the other, the Steven Udvar Hazy Center, is in Virginia.
The Space Shuttle Discovery is on display at the Virginia museum
The National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, also called the NASM, is a museum in Washington, D.C.. It holds the largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft in the world. It was established in 1946 as the National Air Museum and opened its main building on the National Mall near L’Enfant Plaza in 1976. In 2014, the museum saw approximately 6.7 million visitors, making it the fifth most visited museum in the world. The museum contains the Apollo 11 command module, the Friendship 7 capsule which was flown by John Glenn, the Bell X-1 which broke the sound barrier, and the Wright brothers’ plane near the entrance.
The National Air and Space Museum is a center for research into the history and science of aviation and spaceflight, as well as planetary science and terrestrial geology and geophysics. Almost all space and aircraft on display are originals or the original backup craft. It operates an annex, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, at Dulles International Airport, which opened in 2003 and itself encompasses 760,000 square feet (71,000 m2). The museum currently conducts restoration of its collection at the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility in Suitland, Maryland, while steadily moving such restoration and archival activities into the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar, a part of the Udvar-Hazy annex facilities as of 2014.
The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, also called the Udvar-Hazy Center, is the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM)’s annex at Washington Dulles International Airport in the Chantilly area of Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. It holds numerous exhibits, including the Space Shuttle Discovery and the Enola Gay.
The 760,000-square-foot (71,000 m2) facility was made possible by a $65 million gift in October 1999 to the Smithsonian Institution by Steven F. Udvar-Házy, an immigrant from Hungary and co-founder of the International Lease Finance Corporation, an aircraft leasing corporation.[2] The main NASM building, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C, had always contained more artifacts than could be displayed, and most of the collection had been stored, unavailable to visitors, at the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility in Silver Hill, Maryland. A substantial addition to the center encompassing restoration, conservation and collection-storage facilities was completed in 2010. Restoration facilities and museum archives were moved from the museum’s Garber facility to the new sections of the Udvar-Hazy Center.[3]
