Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Air & Space Magazine

During a 2011 performance over Quonset Point, Rhode Island, the Skytypers soloists cross within 50 feet of each other.

World’s Biggest Billboard

Want to get your message across in letters as tall as the Empire State Building and stretching across eight miles of sky? Call The Geico Skytypers.

None

Water + ZZ Top – Gravity =

Playing with sound waves and a drop of water in microgravity.

None

Elephant Walk

F-16s taxi down the runway.

None

Three Dust Devils

Storms move across the Martian landscape.

None

Toe Koozies

The zero-gravity equivalent to flip-flops

A Sea Shadow (IX-529) craft at dusk.

Sea Shadow for Sale

For a mere $300,000, you can buy this unique stealthy seagoing vessel

None

Get Me to the Derby On Time

The Run for the Roses starts with a flight to Churchill Downs

None

Space History Items Bring $1 Million

To buy a piece of space history, you need plenty of cash

None

A Comet’s Tale

The story of the first commercial airliner is brave and tragic. 

None

The Tyranny (and Power) of Rocket Travel

The energy now stored in my body is seven times greater than what would be in an 80- kilogram pile of TNT

The Weird World of Folk Aviators

With his whimsical sculptures, Gregory Bryant celebrates early ideas about winged flight.

None

A Saturn V’s Final Journey: From Mildew to Museum

A new book recounts (sort of) the difficult restoration of a deteriorating Saturn V

None

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers*

The legal status and ownership of resources harvested from space are unclear. How does such uncertainty affect our plans to exploit them?

Hangar One at Moffett Field, with USS Macon overhead.

Second Life for Hangar One

The Moffett Field landmark may yet house aircraft again.

The day Discovery completed its 39th and final flight — March 9, 2011 — a tug pulled the vehicle into an Orbiter Processing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center for a thorough examination.

Orbiter Autopsies

What NASA will learn from dissecting Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour

Diary of a Spy

Events that made the U-2 the world’s most famous player in the game of espionage.

The driver tailing the U-2 is himself a U-2 pilot.

Wingman in a Pontiac

It takes two to land the dragon lady.

Lin Xu has copied dozens of U-2 images over the past four years, driving eight hours from his home near Boston, to the National Archives’ research facility in College Park, Maryland.

Lin Xu’s Obsession

It started with a search for images of his hometown in China. Hundreds of miles of film later, he can’t stop looking.

A pilot takes a self-portrait aboard the U-2. The Air Force is retrofitting the airplane’s cockpit so it is pressurized to a more comfortable 15,000-foot equivalent.

Killer at 70,000 Feet

The occupational hazards of flying the U-2

Han Decai (among many others) would find that only a missile could down the high-altitude spyplane.

Bring Down the Spyplane

MIG-17 vs. Lockheed U-2

Page 166 of 320