Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Air & Space Magazine

Postcard of the Marquis d'Equevilley-Montjustin's 1907/1908 multiplane.

Five Airplanes That Made No Difference

Celebrating the wrong turns in aviation’s early evolution.

Just some of the stars at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Ask the Astronaut: Do you believe there’s life on other planets?

The aurora as seen from the International Space Station.

Ask the Astronaut: Has space travel changed your life?

Haze layers appear above the horizon of Pluto in this image returned by New Horizons.

New Horizons is Still Only Halfway Through Its Download from Pluto

There are more pictures and data yet to come, as NASA faces a decision on the spacecraft’s future.

None

One Giant Leap

Technical Sergeant Benjamin Jones jumps from 10,000 feet out of a C-130 Hercules over Yokota Air Base, Japan.

The air outside space shuttle Challenger’s window glows a hot pink-orange during reentry of the STS-41G flight in 1984.

Ask the Astronaut: Does it feel hot inside a spacecraft during reentry?

Artists's conception of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) attached to the station.

NASA’s Inflatable Room Is Almost Ready

After years of planning, the Bigelow BEAM module is due to arrive at the space station next month.

Astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Sandy Magnus play with floating food during the STS-126 shuttle mission.

Ask the Astronaut: What is free fall?

None

Momotombo Eruption

This composite image from NASA’s Terra Earth-observing satellite shows the December 2015 eruption of Nicaragua’s Momotombo volcano; it’s first since 1905. The hot lava flow is in yellow and white.

The ICAROS virtual reality flight simulator doubles as an excercise machine.

Bird or Superman: What’s the Best Way to Fly in Virtual Reality?

Like so many things, it depends.

Guardrail aircraft were first used in Germany in 1971 to monitor Soviet troops in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Beginning in 1984, the inventory was updated to the Northrop Grumman RC-12.

See, Hear, Sniff: How Airborne Spies Collect Intel

Spyplanes are filled with gizmos that gather information in three major ways.

None

Experimental Flying Wing

A Northrop B-35 flying wing. Prototypes of the experimental heavy bomber were flown in the late 1940s, but it never went into production.

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute created their first self-replicating synthetic bacteria, JCVI-syn1.0 (shown here in a scanning electron micrograph) in 2010.

Scientists Create Bacteria with the Smallest Known Genome

Synthetic life may help us understand life on other planets.

Members of the New Horizons team and journalists review new processed images from the New Horizons spacecraft, July 15, 2015. (Embedded journalist, standing left, Jeff Moore, science team, NASA Ames Research Center; Randy Gladstone science team Southwest Research Institute (SwRI); Andy Chaikin, science writer; Willam Lewis, science writer; Will Grundy, science team, Lowell Observatory; Maria Stothoff, media relations, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL); Steve Maran, science writer. Seated; Laura Cantillo, NASA media relations, left, John Spencer, science team, Southwest Research Institute; and New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of SwRI.)

Kudos for Pluto

The New Horizons team will receive the National Air and Space Museum’s 2016 Current Achievement Award.

Gemini and Apollo astronaut James Lovell.

Jim Lovell, From Carriers to the Moon

The veteran astronaut is honored with the National Air and Space Museum Lifetime Achievement trophy.

Space shuttle Columbia, on the pad before its first launch in April 1981

The Space Shuttle’s First Crisis

A new book details the drama behind the launch of the world’s first reusable spaceship.

First spotted in Afghanistan and now flying at Creech Air Force Base, the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel is the first U.S. Air Force stealth drone—we think.

The Drone that Stalked Bin Laden

The RQ-170 provided a secret, and vital, piece of the intel puzzle.

Tsunami (with Super Corsair) was named for the rogue waves that can reach a speed of nearly 600 mph.

Born to Race

Just how close a pair of custom-built racers came to unseating the kings of Reno.

Two Bell UH-1Bs, flown by the Navy’s lone helicopter attack unit in Vietnam, patrol the country’s south on a 1967 mission to support Navy SEALs.

Scramble Seawolves!

When Navy SEALs in the Mekong Delta needed help, salvation came from a pair of beat-up Hueys.

Geysers of water spray out from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Where there's water, could there be life?

Looking for Life Among the Gas Giants

The search for signs of biology on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Page 78 of 320