Smithsonian Air Space Opens after Big Remodel

I can’t count how many times I’ve been to the Smithsonian Air Space museum in DC. As an engineer, that stuff is addictive and inspiring. I lived a summer in DC, and couldn’t stay out of that and the rest of the museums. Great stuff.

Air Space has had a big renovation going on for the past couple of years. Recently, they opened half of the new museum to the public, but you had to have a (free) ticket for a certain time slot. The lines were still long, and the post-covid crowds are still stunning, but what a great time. My wife and I went up on the train and stayed in a hotel just 2 blocks from the museum.

They’ve added a lot of stuff in the renovation. A planetarium, a lot of sci-fi references, a lot of tech that isn’t directly related to flight. The Imax theater is not reopened, yet, and there are a lot of clues that they’re going to hang an SR71 in the next section, so there’s a lot to look forward to.

When you first enter, you can tell the managerie of old aircraft from the 50’s that used to be up on the ceiling has been culled. The first thing that caught my eye was the model of the original NC1701 that they used for filming the tv series nearly 60 years ago. It was bigger than I thought it would be, probably 8 feet long. It was always filmed from one side, because the other side had wires coming out of it.

We started our visit upstairs. So coming up the escalator, the first thing I saw over my head was a Star Wars X-wing. It was pretty close to 1:1 scale, probably 40 feet long. There was even a point of view from which you could see R2D2 sitting in the back. I just stood there with my jaw hanging open, my wife laughing at me.

Most engineers geek out on space stuff, and I’d be willing to bet that there are more than a couple sci-fi fans with engineering degrees.

I have to admit that I felt a little bit guilty here in a museum – the shrine of non-fiction – gawking at a non-functional piece of space fiction. In a space museum. Was it right?

Maybe the curators were going for that cheap score. Anyone interested in space is interested in sci-fi, right? So they could only win by putting in a lot of pop culture technology. I was struggling with the crass banality of sci-fi in a space museum until I saw the following display:

What’s wrong with this? First, they combine toys, fiction and non-fiction, next, they combine Star Wars and Star Trek, and finally they mix up the scales of the objects. The Enterprise should be much bigger than the Tie Fighter. This display really seemed cheap up against the effort they put into everything else.

There was a section just devoted to speed. In a way this didn’t fit with the rest of the theme of the museum, but anyone interested in space is interested in all things that go fast. So they had Mario Andretti’s F1, Richard Petty’s Monte Carlo. But then they also had internal combustion engines and jet engines on display.

One of the coolest displays I thought was a part of a recovered engine from a space mission. It was totally mangled and a bit corroded. It’s just interesting all of the engineering that goes into a single use item that gets discarded after a couple of minutes of use.

Of course they still had a lot of the old space displays, but had one room totally devoted to the history of the Apollo missions. There were displays on each Apollo mission, describing the purpose, the people, and interesting things that happened on the trip.

There was a display also on the small steps the space program took to make sure they could launch, orbit, make it to the moon, orbit the moon, land on the moon, each in small achievable steps.

One of my favorite displays from the old museum was the moon buggy. Engineers love stuff that moves and space, and to combine those, it’s just a slam dunk. My favorite part of the moon buggy is the tires. The tires are mesh with sheet metal tread, and then there’s a spring steel core inside the tire that acts as a secondary bounce. Simple solution to a complex problem.

There was so much more there, but I have to leave a few reasons for you to want to go. Drones, history of flight, planetary exploration, the venerable 747 cockpit, lots of stuff. We spent at least 4 hours there, and the other half of the renovation wasn’t open yet. If you want to get kids excited about science, engineering and technology, take them to the Air Space museum. This big kid enjoyed it so much I almost forgave them for the Star Wars/Star Trek faux pas.