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James S. McDonnell Space Hangar

November 1, 2004 - Permanent

Museum: Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center

Location: West of Aviation Hangar

Some 160 large space and missile artifacts and 500 smaller space history artifacts are on view to illustrate the scope of space exploration history as organized around the following four main themes: rocketry and missiles, human spaceflight, applications satellites, and space science. Highlights include:

• Space Shuttle Discovery, NASA's longest-serving orbiter, which flew 39 missions from 1984 through 2011 and spent 365 days in space
• An unflown Mercury series spacecraft
• Gemini 7 space capsule, flown by Frank Borman and James Lovell on their two-week orbital endurance mission in 1965
• Apollo command module Boilerplate, used by Navy personnel to train for shipboard retrieval procedures
• Spacelab Laboratory Module
• Mobile Quarantine Facility #3, 1 of 4 Airstream trailers built by NASA to isolate astronauts in order to prevent the spread of any lunar-based contagions ("moon germs"); used by the crew of Apollo 11 after their return to Earth
• 63-foot floor-to-ceiling Mercury-Redstone missile
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind Mothership model, used for the filming of the movie of the same name
• A case of popular culture space toys
• Anita, a spider used for web formation experiments aboard Skylab
• Sirius FM-4 digital radio broadcasting satellite (installed October 24, 2012)

Related app from Air & Space magazine: Space Shuttle Era: Stories from 30 Years of Exploration.

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