The Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

Abstract

The Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution Matthew Hersch (bio) The bicentennial crowds that flocked to the grand opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., needed no label cards to identify the holy relics before them. Like the medieval travelers who clogged the streets of Reims to prostrate themselves in the great cathedral, the Air and Space pilgrims of July 1976 knew exactly what they were going to see and needed little help in understanding it. Inside the striking stone and glass temple’s Milestones of Flight entrance atrium lay such treasures as the Wright Flyer, the Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis (the airplane that carried Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic), and the diminutive Apollo 11 command module Columbia (its pilot, Michael Collins, loathed calling it a “capsule”) that, only seven years earlier, carried Commander Neil Armstrong, Collins, and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin to the moon and back. In a world abundant with dubious pieces of the One True Cross, these relics were undeniably real: irreplaceable flown artifacts lovingly restored, from Armstrong’s lunar vestments to the doubting finger of Edward White’s 1965 space suit glove. If that was not enough to satiate the appetite of the pious, Collins himself had stewarded the opening as the museum’s director. It was as if John the Baptist drove the bus on a Holy Land tour. I must confess: I was on that bus. Though too small to remember everything I saw, I was grandly amused by my first outing to what museum insiders call “NASM” shortly after it opened, as indeed, people of all ages continue to be when visiting a museum that was, until recently, the most trafficked in the world. Within a month of opening in 1976, the museum’s main building had received over a million visitors. A second large public [End Page 998] facility near Dulles Airport followed in 2003 as the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar Hazy-Center, presently home to space shuttle orbiter Discovery. In addition to displaying the technological heritage of the United States, though, NASM quickly emerged as the foremost center of scholarly research and public education in the history of aviation and spaceflight (as well as a prestigious site of research in earth and planetary sciences). Scarcely a single scholar in aerospace history has not benefited in some way from NASM’s generosity (myself included). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Visitors enjoy the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall on a hot July afternoon. At left, the flown Spirit of St. Louis is suspended over Project Apollo lunar module LM-2 (configured as Apollo 11’s Eagle). To its right, on the floor, are flown spacecraft Gemini IV and Mercury Friendship 7, followed by a Viking Mars lander. (Immediately above them hang Explorer 1 and Sputnik 1.) Hanging from the ceiling, from left to right, are Pioneer 10 and Mariner 2, the flown SpaceShipOne, and a flown X-15. Guests can touch an actual moon rock collected on the Apollo 17 mission at the kiosk on the bottom left. (Source: Photograph by author.) The decades have been kind to NASM’s main building on the mall but not, perhaps, to its famous physical edifice. Worn down by forty years and a total number of visitors roughly equal to the population of the United States, the main building is receiving an inside-out renovation that will replace (among other things) the structure’s famous marble façade and provide opportunities to re-curate galleries that, in some cases, date from the building’s opening in 1976. Chief among these is Milestones of Flight, [End Page 999] which houses some of the facility’s most famous artifacts spanning the history of flight, mounted and suspended from the ceiling like an airshow in a particularly amazing science fiction movie. In 2016, and with financial support from Boeing, Milestones reopened to visitors. This thoughtful and skillful refresh confronts directly the foremost challenge facing NASM in the twenty-first century: telling the history of explorations almost as remote...