A renovation that has been years in the making is reaching closer to full completion. As the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., celebrated its 50th anniversary at the start of the month, five new galleries were opened to the public.
The Jay I. Kislak World War II in the Air gallery covers nearly four years of action in the Pacific and European theaters, from Pearl Harbor devastation and island hopping to the ultimate end of the war. One of the interesting things in here was the poster describing how to identify aircraft from the ground — and a set of three gray models that allows visitor to try their hand at identifying friendly aircraft from foes.
The U.S. National Science Foundation Discovering Our Universe gallery takes visitors deeper into the tools that scientists use to study the origins and future of the universe.
RTX Living in the Space Age focuses on the ways space technology has moved into everyday life. This includes everything from civil defense sirens / tornado sirens to satellite internet technologies.
Nearby, TEXTRON How Things Fly uses nearly 50 interactive exhibits to explain the forces of lift, weight, drag and thrust. This includes a lot of models and kid-friendly displays to demonstrate flight, like this cutaway of a jet engine.
One of the more interesting exhibits is the new Flight and the Arts Center, located on the second-floor with a third level mezzanine including the current exhibitions “The Ascent of Rauschenberg: Reinventing the Art of Flight” and “The Art of Air and Space: Interpretations of Flight.” I think my personal favorites were the Norman Rockwell works in this collection.
About the photos
I actually tried something different for this post, forgoing the professional camera and sticking to the cameras on an iPhone 17 Pro. Some of the photos are a little noisier than I’d prefer, but this is sufficient enough and offers the flexibility given the variety in size of artifacts on display, from small buttons to tall rockets and even the interior of the backup Skylab space station. (For what it’s worth, none of the images in this photo gallery were edited. These are straight out of camera.)
Despite most of the museum being reopened by now, with the exception of two more galleries scheduled to open in the fall, free timed-entry passes are still required.
