Pilotless aircraft have been around longer than you might think. In 1898, newspapers heralded the dawn of a new age with the invention of a device that would “render fleets and guns useless.” Physical ...

To end the brutality of World War I combat, military strategists looked to the skies for victory. World War I airplanes that can still fly are a rarity. In the United States, in fact, only a handful ...

These days, it takes seven hours to fly from New York to London, compared to under three hours flying at twice the speed of sound on the Concorde. When I started my internship at the National Air and ...

When NASA astronaut Ellison Onizuka rode Space Shuttle Discovery into space on shuttle mission STS-51-C in 1985, he made history on several counts. He was the first Asian American astronaut, the first ...

There’s a reason you don’t know the names of the first American women to fly combat missions. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower tore through the waters of the Persian Gulf on November 15, 1994. On the ...

How a cartoon beagle helped popularize NASA’s Apollo program. A Snoopy doll sold in 1969 wears a spacesuit and carries a flight safety pack, reflecting his role as a mascot for NASA’s Space Flight ...

Leonardo da Vinci created masterpieces of art and sculpture. Equally remarkable, his aggregate achievements in engineering, mathematics, anatomy, geology, physics, music, military technology, ...

Browse our collections, stories, research, and on demand content. Maj. Richard Heyser had been sitting 14 miles above the Earth for 5 hours. Soaring at the edge of space, he flew from northern ...

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project...will be ...

Kalpana Chawla, PhD, was an engineer, pilot, and astronaut who spent more than 30 days in space over two Space Shuttle missions. Chawla was born in Karnal, India, and was fascinated by flight since ...

Fifty years ago, on December 19, 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific. They were the last humans to visit the Moon—and the last to be more than 400 miles from the Earth. Since ...

The Saturn V rocket, the launch vehicle for the Apollo lunar missions in the 1960s and 1970s, remains the largest and heaviest rocket ever successfully launched. It stood 363 feet tall (taller than ...