Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

One of the world's most visited museums, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has an incredible array of original artifacts from the history of flight and space exploration.

During its visitor numbers heyday in the late 1990s through the early 2000s, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC was a contender for the most-visited museum in the world, besting even long-established institutions like the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London. In recent years, the annual tally has slipped somewhat,¹ even if the Smithsonian Institution seems reluctant to relinquish the crown², but it still attracts something north of 5 to 6 million visitors annually. And perhaps most remarkably, it handles this crush of visitors with surprisingly few lines.

Thanks to an annex opened in 2003, the Air and Space Museum is now actually two venues, one on the National Mall in downtown Washington DC close to the US Capitol, and another hangar-like structure known as the Udvar-Hazy Center about 30 minutes away in Chantilly, near Dulles Airport. Considering the extraordinary size of many of the museum's artifacts--there are only so many airplanes you can fit in a building--the Udvar-Hazy extension was purpose-built to display a good portion of the 85 percent of the museum's artifacts that simply didn't fit in the building on the National Mall.

Highlights of the Udvar-Hazy Center include the Space Shuttle Discovery, an SR-71 Blackbird, a Concord, and the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Highlights of the main building on the National Mall include the original Wright Brothers Flyer, the Apollo 11 command module, the Spirit of St. Louis, and a full backup Skylab.

Photos of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

The sun casts a silhouette of a display of an astronaut doing a space walk near the Space Shuttle Discovery. Photo by David Coleman

National Mall building. Photo by David Coleman

Known as the Clipper Flying Cloud, this is a Boeing 307 Stratoliner first flown in 1938. It was the first airliner with a pressurized cabin and could carry 33 passengers at a cruise altitude of 20,000 feet. Photo by David Coleman

Project Mercury. He launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida and spent nearly five hours aloft before splashing down in the North Atlantic Ocean to be picked up by the USS *Noa*." width="678" height="450" class="size-medium wp-image-22635" /> John Glenn's Mercury 7 capsule. Photo by David Coleman

Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Photo by David Coleman

The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, a Cold War-era supersonic military reconnaissance aircraft that remains the world's fastest jet-propelled aircraft. On its last flight, which was to bring it from Los Angeles to the Smithsonian in 1990, it set a speed record by completing the route in 1 hour, 4 minutes, and 20 seconds, averaging over 2,100 miles per hour. For comparison, a typical commercial passenger flight between LA and Dulles takes around 5 hours. Photo by David Coleman

Control Tower and entrance at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Photo by David Coleman

Photo by David Coleman

Photo by David Coleman

Red Baron and World War I exhibit. Photo by David Coleman

Photo by David Coleman

Charles Lindbergh's plane the Sprit of St. Louis. Photo by David Coleman

Space Shuttle Discovery. Photo by David Coleman

Spitfire. Photo by David Coleman

SR-71 Blackbird. Photo by David Coleman

Amelia Earheart exhibit. Photo by David Coleman

Clipper Flying Cloud. Photo by David Coleman

SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. Photo by David Coleman

Commercial aviation exhibit. Photo by David Coleman

Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Photo by David Coleman

Photo by David Coleman

Thruster rockets of the Space Shuttle Enterprise. Photo by David Coleman

Spitfire. Photo by David Coleman

A control tower at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center forms both an exhibit and a viewpoint for watching planes land and take off at the nearby Dulles International Airport (IAD). Photo by David Coleman

360 Degree Panoramic Virtual Tours of the Udvar-Hazy Center

What to Know Before You Go

Both are free to enter (but parking at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center is $15 per car). Both can get very busy, especially during the summer, but the vast expanse of the Udvar-Hazy Center can accommodate more people without it feeling crowded.

The National Mall Building is easy to find--it's right on the National Mall, up the eastern end towards the US Capitol Building.

For directions and public transport options for the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, see their website.

Both have McDonald's restaurants inside the facility. (UPDATE: The cafe in the National Mall location is closed for renovation.)

Information for Photographers

If you plan on taking photos at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, I've put together a separate pages for each of the facilities with information for photographers: National Mall Building | Udvar-Hazy Center.