National Air and Space Museum

The National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall holds the most famous flying machines in the world under one roof: the 1903 Wright Flyer, Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, the Bell X-1 that first broke the sound barrier, John Glenn's Friendship 7 and the Apollo 11 command module that carried the first Moon landing crew home. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, it opened in July 1976 and has been one of the most visited museums on earth ever since. Admission is free, but timed entry passes are required.

The building has been through a complete renovation that began in 2018. The west half reopened in October 2022 with the Wright Brothers gallery, Destination Moon and America by Air. Five more galleries, including the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall and Pioneers of Flight, reopened in July 2025, and another five, among them Living in the Space Age with the Skylab workshop and the Hubble test telescope, opened on the museum's fiftieth anniversary on the first of July 2026. Two galleries, At Home in Space and Modern Military Aviation, remain closed and are due to open in October and November 2026.

The museum is organised as a series of themed galleries on two floors around the central Milestones hall, which you enter from the Mall side or from the redesigned Jefferson Drive entrance. Aviation is mostly on the first floor and space flight on both, with a planetarium and an IMAX theatre. Its sister building, the Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles airport, holds the Space Shuttle Discovery and the Enola Gay and is a separate visit. Give the Mall building three hours, and start in Milestones of Flight to get your bearings.