National Air Museum The Air and Space Museum was originally called the
National Air Museum when formed on August 12, 1946, by an act of
Congress and signed into law by President
Harry S. Truman. Some pieces in the National Air and Space Museum collection date back to the 1876
Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia after which the Chinese Imperial Commission donated a group of kites to the Smithsonian after Smithsonian Secretary
Spencer Fullerton Baird convinced exhibiters that shipping them home would be too costly. The
Stringfellow steam engine intended for aircraft was added to the collection in 1989, the first piece actively acquired by the Smithsonian now in the current NASM collection. '', flown by aviator
Charles Lindbergh in 1927 on the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight
Command Module Columbia carried astronauts
Buzz Aldrin,
Neil Armstrong, and
Michael Collins to the Moon and back during the first human lunar landing mission, July 1969 After the establishment of the museum, there was no one building that could hold all the items to be displayed, many obtained from the
United States Army and
United States Navy collections of domestic and captured aircraft from
World War I. Some pieces were on display in the
Arts and Industries Building, some were stored in the Aircraft Building (also known as the "Tin Shed"), a large temporary metal shed in the Smithsonian Castle's south yard. Larger missiles and rockets were displayed outdoors in what was known as Rocket Row. The shed housed a large Martin bomber, a
LePere fighter-bomber, and an
Aeromarine 39B floatplane. Still, much of the collection remained in storage due to a lack of display space. The rest of the site was occupied by a cluster of
temporary war buildings that existed from World War I until the 1960s. The
space race in the 1950s and 1960s led to the renaming of the museum to the National Air and Space Museum, and finally congressional passage of appropriations for the construction of the new exhibition hall, which opened July 1, 1976, at the height of the
United States Bicentennial festivities under the leadership of Director
Michael Collins, who had flown to the Moon on
Apollo 11.
Later history In 1988, a glass-enclosed pavilion named the Wright Place was constructed and opened at the east end of the museum. It contained a restaurant known as Flight Lane, but the restaurant closed in 2001 and reopened as a food court on May 24, 2002, with
McDonald's (later added with a
McCafé),
Boston Market, and
Donato's Pizza serving as the tenants. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center opened on December 15, 2003, funded by a private donation. The museum received
COSTAR, the corrective optics instrument installed in the
Hubble Space Telescope during its first servicing mission (
STS-61), when it was removed and returned to Earth after
Space Shuttle mission
STS-125. The museum also holds the backup mirror for the Hubble which, unlike the one that was launched, was ground to the correct shape. There were once plans for it to be installed to the Hubble itself, but plans to return the satellite to Earth were scrapped after the
Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003; the mission was re-considered as too risky. In 2018, the museum received Schmitt Space Communicator, the device with the on-flight internet connection launched by
Solstar on a
New Shepard rocket to send the first tweet from space. The Smithsonian has also been promised the
International Cometary Explorer, which is currently in a solar orbit that occasionally brings it back to Earth, should
NASA attempt to recover it. ==Architecture==