National Air and Space Museum

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Air and Space Museum stands on a stretch of the National Mall where, not so long ago, the city kept its armory and then its war wounded. During the Civil War, that land became Armory Square Hospital, taking in the worst cases carried from distant battlefields. By the time the museum opened in 1976, more than three million people a year would eventually walk through the same ground. What made the building possible, what fills its walls, and why a single exhibit about a World War II bomber nearly tore the institution apart are the questions this documentary explores.

• 2. Origins and Early Collection

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  On the 12th of August 1946, an act of Congress signed by President Harry S. Truman brought the National Air Museum into existence. Its earliest pieces, though, predate the museum itself by decades. At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Smithsonian Secretary Spencer Fullerton Baird persuaded exhibitors that shipping certain items home would cost more than it was worth. The Chinese Imperial Commission donated a group of kites to the Smithsonian as a result, and those kites became some of the first objects in what would eventually become this collection. The first piece the Smithsonian actively acquired for what is now NASM was the Stringfellow steam engine, designed for aircraft use, added in 1889.

  After the museum was established, no single building could hold everything. Aircraft donated by the U.S. Army and Navy after World War I were scattered across multiple locations. Some pieces occupied the Arts and Industries Building. Others sat in the Aircraft Building, nicknamed the "Tin Shed," a temporary metal shed in the yard of the Smithsonian Castle. That shed held a large Martin bomber, a LePere fighter-bomber, and an Aeromarine 39B floatplane. Larger missiles and rockets stood outdoors in a stretch called Rocket Row. Much of the collection simply sat in storage because there was nowhere adequate to put it.

  The pressure of the Korean War shifted the equation. The war created demand for hangar and factory space, and the volume of aircraft donated after World War II was enormous. In 1952, curator Paul E. Garber spotted a wooded area from the air and arranged for the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission to cede it to the Smithsonian. Bulldozers from Fort Belvoir and prefabricated buildings from the U.S. Navy kept the costs down. That site became the Garber Facility, still used today for preservation and restoration in Suitland, Maryland.

• 3. The 1976 Building

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  The space race of the 1950s and 1960s prompted Congress to rename the institution the National Air and Space Museum and finally appropriate funds for a proper exhibition hall. The building that opened on the 1st of July 1976 did so at the height of the United States Bicentennial, under Director Michael Collins, the astronaut who had flown to the Moon on Apollo 11.

  Designing a structure next to the United States Capitol required restraint. The Smithsonian did not want anything that would visually overwhelm the Capitol building. St. Louis-based architect Gyo Obata of HOK resolved this by organizing the museum as four marble-encased cubes for smaller and more theatrical exhibits, connected by three steel-and-glass atria for larger objects such as missiles, airplanes, and spacecraft. The museum used the same pink Tennessee marble as the National Gallery of Art across the Mall. Gilbane Building Company built it. The west glass wall was designed to function as a giant door, allowing aircraft to be installed directly into the building.

  From the beginning, almost all of the spacecraft and aircraft on display were the original primary or backup craft, not facsimiles. Among them: the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia, the Friendship 7 capsule flown by John Glenn, Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, the Wright brothers' Wright Flyer near the entrance, and the filming model of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek: The Original Series. That insistence on real objects, not replicas, set the museum apart from the start.

• 4. Later Additions

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  In 1988, a glass-enclosed pavilion called the Wright Place opened at the east end of the museum, housing a restaurant called Flight Lane. That restaurant closed in 2001 and reopened as a food court on the 24th of May 2002, with McDonald's, Boston Market, and Donato's Pizza as tenants.

  The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, a 760,000 square-foot annex at Dulles International Airport, opened on the 15th of December 2003. It was funded by a private donation and includes the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar, where restoration and archival work takes place.

  Over the years the museum's collection has taken on some remarkable objects. It received COSTAR, the corrective optics instrument installed in the Hubble Space Telescope during the first servicing mission, after the instrument was removed and returned to Earth on a later Space Shuttle mission. The museum also holds the backup mirror for the Hubble, which, unlike the one launched into orbit, was ground to the correct shape. Plans once existed to use that mirror as a replacement, but after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, the mission to return the telescope to Earth was judged too dangerous and was scrapped. In 2018, the museum received the Schmitt Space Communicator, the device launched by Solstar on a New Shepard rocket that sent the first tweet from space. The Smithsonian has also been promised the International Cometary Explorer, a spacecraft currently in a solar orbit that periodically brings it close to Earth.

• 5. The Enola Gay Controversy

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  In March 1994, the museum announced plans to mark the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan, with the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, as the centerpiece. When the first draft of the exhibit script was leaked by Air Force Magazine, the reaction was immediate and fierce. Two sentences became particularly notorious. One described the Pacific War as "fundamentally different" from the fight against Germany and Italy, calling it a war of vengeance for Americans. The other framed it, from the Japanese perspective, as a war to defend their culture against western imperialism.

  Veterans' groups, led by the Air Force Association and the Retired Officers Association, argued that including Japanese accounts and photographs of victims politicized the exhibit and insulted U.S. airmen. Editorials called the museum an "unpatriotic institution." Congressional involvement intensified. A second draft was produced, but it too proved contested, leading to line-by-line script reviews by members of Congress.

  The dispute sharpened on the 9th of January 1995, when museum director Martin O. Harwit unilaterally reduced by 75 percent the estimated number of U.S. casualties that would have resulted from an invasion of Japan. On the 18th of January, the American Legion called for a congressional investigation. On the 24th of January, 81 members of Congress demanded Harwit's resignation. He was forced out on the 2nd of May.

  The Organization of American Historians described the congressional interventions as a "transparent attempt at historical cleansing." What eventually went on display was a scaled-back, non-political historical exhibition featuring the forward fuselage of the Enola Gay. It drew more than a million visitors within its first year and, when it closed in May 1998, had attracted nearly four million in total, making it the most popular special exhibition in the history of the museum.

• 6. Renovation and Future

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  The 1976 building was never adequately maintained. A 2015 Smithsonian report laid out the scale of the problem. The HVAC system was close to failure. The roof had deteriorated so severely it required full replacement. The Tennessee marble facade had cracked and warped, and in places had become so damaged it risked falling off entirely. The glass curtain walls, already altered during construction to cut costs, allowed too much ultraviolet radiation through, damaging exhibits including the spacesuit worn by John Young during the Gemini 10 mission and the coating on the Spirit of St. Louis.

  Cost estimates for fixing the building climbed sharply over successive assessments. A $365 million figure in mid-2015 rose to $600 million by March 2016, then to $1 billion by late June 2016, a total that included $676 million for construction, $50 million for new storage, and $250 million for new exhibits. The Smithsonian calculated that demolishing the building and constructing a replacement would cost $2 billion.

  A $30 million donation from Boeing in 2014 funded the renovation of the main entrance hall, which was renamed the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall. Boeing had previously given a total of $58 million to the museum, making the 2014 gift the largest single corporate donation the museum had received. A full building-wide renovation began in October 2018. The renovation included demolishing the food court pavilion to build a 50,000 square-foot, three-story Jeff Bezos Learning Center. The western side of the museum, with eight new galleries and a planetarium, reopened on the 14th of October 2022. As of August 2024-13 galleries were open to the public, with the remaining 10 planned to reopen by 2026. The Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory, which opened in 2009 for the International Year of Astronomy, operates a 16-inch Boller and Chivens telescope and remains open to visitors on a regular schedule throughout the week.