The Wright Brothers & The Invention of the Aerial Age explores who Wilbur and Orville Wright were, what they achieved and how they did it, and how the world first reacted to their revolutionary ...

Earhart’s Lockheed Electra was an extremely attractive aircraft at that time for distance flying, but it did not have the range for the South Pacific. To counteract this, Earhart was forced to plan a ...

Edinburgh Airport, Scotland, United Kingdom (EDI/EGPH) Originally a military airport, Edinburgh Airport opened to commercial aviation in 1977. It is now Scotland's second largest airport after Glasgow ...

In the 1960s during the race to the Moon, the Soviets began to build hardware that in the 1970s became the world's first space station. On April 19, 1971, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first ...

The Space Race grew out of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the most powerful countries after World War II. For a half-century, the two superpowers competed for supremacy ...

U.S. Navy test pilot Alan Shepard joined the astronaut program in 1959. He became the first American and the second man in space on May 5, 1961, when he piloted the Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7 on a ...

The Big Three As the civil airplane progressed from experimental designs to practical transportation, three U.S. aircraft companies formed the backbone of general aviation aircraft: Beechcraft, Cessna ...

After collecting reference material from the Smithsonian and other sources, the Wright brothers began studying their predecessors. They were surprised to learn that, despite humanity’s centuries-old ...

Command Module Handbag Telling the story of the the Apollo 11 lunar landing includes some of the unique pieces of memorabilia created to mark that human achievement. In addition to the pins, patches, ...

Who Flew? Flying was very expensive. Only business travelers and the wealthy could afford to fly. Most people still rode trains or buses for intercity travel because flying was so expensive. A ...

Forty-two helium-filled weather balloons lifted Larry Walters in this aluminum lawn chair from San Pedro, California, on July 2, 1982. Walters reached 16,000 feet (4,880 meters), drifting into the ...

When President Kennedy proclaimed that Americans would put a human on the Moon by the end of the decade, there wasn't a rocket that could get someone there. The engineering feat of the Saturn V rocket ...