Were in the boeing milestones of flight hall at the center of the museum. And this is the hall where we display the pioneering aircraft and spacecraft that transform the modern world. When this Museum Opened in july of 1976, almost every space artifact on display had recently been in the news. This was very much a museum of contemporary space flight. And it was for most people their first chance to see what had been lauded in the 1960s and early 1970s during this heroic age of Space Exploration when humans first ventured off the planet into space and all the way to the moon, when the United States and the soviet union began sending craft out to explore the nearby planets. All of this was exciting, thrilling, and people just flocked in to the museum to see it. In the 40 years since this building opened, we have continued to acquire treasures of space history. We have now about 17,000 artifacts related to space history. We have just over a thousand of them on display in our two locations here in the washington area, and then we have another 1500 on display in other museums around the world. In our tour today, were going to look at system of the original artifacts that were the stars of the show when the national air and space Museum Opened and were also going to look at artifacts from history that has been made since then. Well start our tour right here with the lunar module. The icon for the landing on the moon in july 1969. It actually has a companion spacecraft, the apollo command module. And the command module, its Service Module and the lunar module together carried three astronauts, neil armstrong, buzz aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon. The command module very significantly also brought them back safely. This lunar module is an actual lunar module that never flew in space. Its lunar module 2. It was intended to be used in an earth orbital test flight. But the test was canceled as unnecessary. And so now nasa transferred this lunar module to the national air and space museum. It consists of two parts. The base which has the legs and the rocket engine in it. And then the oddly shaped top, which is the crew module or crew cabin. And this was attached to the command module for the flight from earth to lunar orbit. And once in lunar orbit, the two crewmembers who would descend to the surface, armstrong and aldrin climbed into the lunar module. It separated from the command module where Michael Collins stayed to orbit the moon and it began its descent down to the surface. 40 feet down, 2 1 2. Picking up some dust. Drifting to the right a little. Contact right. Okay. Engine stop. We copy it down, eagle. The eagle has landed. This was a thrilling moment in history. And almost everybody who was alive at that moment remembered where they were, whether they were watching it on television in their own homes or if they were standing in an Appliance Store watching it on a television. People around the world stopped to watch the landing on the moon and the first steps of human beings on the moon. Im going to step off now. Thats one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind. After the crew. The apollo 11 crew had climbed out, done some exploration close to the lunar module, collected some samples of lunar soil and rocks, taken some photographs, placed a u. S. Flag on the moon, they went back in to the lunar module. And this became their vehicle for their trip home. They launched the small top portion, leaving the base on the moon. They ascending back up into lunar orbit, rendezvoused with the command module again. Exited the lunar module. And once they were secure inside the command module, reunited with Michael Collins, the lunar module was detached, and it fell back to the moon with an intentional crash on the moon. Because geologists and seismologists wanted to be able to track what kind of impact it made on the moon. So from a space historians point of view, these two craft, the apollo command module and the lunar module are the icons of the space race, along with the suits warn by the astronauts on the moon. These symbolize that very historic moment in time, july 1969. When human beings first set foot on another body in our solar system. And in effect won the space race. When children look at this spacecraft, they often say that doesnt look like a spaceship because we tend to think that spacecraft are always streamlined and maybe they look like rockets. More than anything else. But this spacecraft has an interesting design, and in many ways its fairly primitive given the job that it had to do. It didnt need to be streamlined on the outside because it was not going to operate in the atmosphere. It would only operate in the vacuum of space. And it would not be subject to a strong gravitational field on the moon. So its actually fairly flimsy in some areas. The legs are obviously strong. The mount for the rocket engine is strong. But the craft itself and particularly the crew module or crew cabin was really fairly spartan. It had two windows. Neil armstrong had command of the craft during the final descent to landing. Both of them were standing. They were fully suited in their space suit, and they pretty much filled that interior volume in that position with those space suits on. It was not really designed for comfort. It was designed for the purpose of landing, giving the crew an exit so they could spend a couple of hours on the surface of the moon, and then launching again along with their precious cargo of lunar soil and rocks to bring back home to demonstrate that they had been there and to have those materials for scientists to begin analyzing to better understand the moon. Its also amazing to think that the Computing Power required in that day to send these craft to the moon and to program them for the descent and the launch was done with fairly primitive computer programs, and memory was minuscule compared to the memory we have now. And its often said that the Computing Power we hold in our hands every day with our smart phones is vastly more than it took to send people to the moon and back. It gives you a sense of the ingenuity of the engineers in that day to device the solutions to get people to the moon and back safely. So we have seen the iconic artifacts from the heroic age of space flight in the 1960s. Just feet away from it is a much more contemporary spacecraft, spaceship 1. The first craft privately developed not by nasa, not by the u. S. Government, but by a company headed by bert rutan, an ingenious aircraft a designer. Spaceship 1 was the first privately developed craft ever to be launched into space, returned to earth, be launched again, return to earth with a human on board. And by doing that in the year 2004, spaceshipone won the ansari x prize, a prize of 10 million that was posted to encourage commercial development of spacecraft that could be used for space tourism. Spaceshipone operators as a suborbital craft. Like alan shepard did in 1961, it goes up, makes a loop into space and then glides back down to a landing like an airplane would land. There is a mother ship that is the actual transporter aircraft. And spaceshipone snuggles up under it. The mother ship is the one that flies it around here in the atmosphere. And then its released from that. And after its released is when the rocket engine ignites and it shoots straight up. Spaceshipone is a very innovative design in that it has a hybrid rocket that is part liquid propellant and sport solid propellant. Kit hold three people, though in its prize winning flights it had only the pilot and some ballast to indicate the weight of two people. And it has a very distinctive design. As you can see right now, its in a configuration with its wings up at about, oh, 50,000 feet, 40 to 50,000 feet. Those wings are down. And its very streamlined looking. But as it shoots up into orbit and reaches that threshold of about 100 kilometers or 62 miles, the wings pivot up. And that stabilizes the craft for that loop over in orbit. And the loop lasts about six minutes during which the pilot and any passengers would be able to experience weightlessness, if they wanted to unbuckle their seat belt, they would rise out of their seats. They can look through all the wound windows and get a wonderful view of the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space. And then as the craft begins to descend, the feathered wings, what theyre called, the feathered wings stabilize the space just the same way that the a badminton birdie or a shuttlecock is stabilized so that the nose stays downward pointing and the whole craft stays stable. It also creates more drag and slows the spacecraft down more quickly so it doesnt need a bulky heat shield. As spaceshipone comes back into the atmosphere, once its part of the atmosphere where there is enough air that it can fly, aerodynamically again, the wings stream back down into position and it glides down to a land in the desert. This little spacecraft is reminiscent of a race car. Its sleek. It looks aerodynamic. It looks speedy. And it looks sporty. And it just looks like the kind of craft that a person who wanted to go up into space for a quick look and a quick experience of what weightlessness might want to climb in and go for a ride. Where this may go is to the next step which is larger spaceship too. And sir richard branson, who operates virgin or owns Virgin Atlantic airways partnered with bert rutan and his Company Scale composites to do a larger version of spaceshipone. In this case we worked with the owner, manufacturer, designer, burt rutan. And also his Business Partner paul allen who is one of the cofounders of microsoft. And we approached them after the first flight in he has named it Virgin Galactic. June and it will hold 12 people. Of and it is being developed for 200 the express purpose of providing 4 space flight to paying customers. Who want to have the experience and of space flight. They dont have a set debut date said regardless of yet. Whether they suffered a real setback when one of their test flights you crashed. Win but its still out there on the the horizon as something that is x likely to happen. Prize or not, we think space ship one deserves to be and Virgin Galactic is by no in means the only such company. The there are other companies who national are developing spacecraft for al collection. Because it was the first private privately developed spacecraft piloted by human being to go into space and return. You might notice there is a small dent in the nosil of the engine. That is not damage by delivering it to the museum or suspending it from the rafters. Rather that buckled in space during its first test flight when the engine ignited and just the heat and the force of the engine ignition buckled the nozzle. For the second flight and the third flight, a different nozzle was used, and they also made some corrections to the ignition sequence so they didnt have that buckling problem again. But when we asked to have space ship one delivered to us for the national collection, we asked to have it returned to its original configuration from its first flight. The first flight wasnt the prizewinning flight, but it was the recordbreaking flight. And so they went to the trouble to reinstall the dented engine nozzle on it. Our next stop will be skylab. And were going to look at that because it is one of the original artifacts on display here since before this Museum Opened. Skylab is so large that it was brought into the museum before the building was closed out. Now im standing in front of a model of skylab that is as tall as i am, but the real skylab orbital workstation behind me absolutely dwarfs the model and me. It reaches from the floor up into the skylights of this building two stories tall. Skylab was the United States first space station. It was placed in orbit in 1973, and in 1973 and 74, three different nasa astronaut crews spent time aboard it. Three men at a time. One group was there for one month. Another group for two months, and the third group for three months. And the whole point of the Skylab Missions was to get some experience in living and working in space. When the Apollo Program came to an end, there was still some hardware left over and nasa thought can we do with this . We developed this tremendous ability to launch spacecraft all the way to the moon. We still have a couple of these powerful rockets on hand. Can we repurpose them and do something else. And so the decision reached was to take the third stage of the gigantic saturn v rocket that powered the spacecraft away from earth on a trajectory to the moon and turned that into a habitable module, a sort of miniature space station that crews could live in while getting this experience of living and working in space. And the actual element that is behind me is the full cylinder that is marked by this wide white band here. And you can see from the cutaway there that its twostories on the inside. And those were two floors where the astronauts could actually live. In the missions to the moon and the earth orbit, they had been spacecraft that were essentially cockpits. They had no more room in them than a sports car. But skylab was like having a house. And it actually had rooms in it. There was a galley ward room where they could prepare food, meet around a table, eat together. They still were eating out of plastic bags and tin cans, but at least it was more home like and more sociable. They had sleeping quarters. Three little bunk areas about the size of closets. But still each member had a private area to retire for some solitary time and some sleep without being confined to the flight seat in a capsule. And most important, it had an actual bathroom. It had an actual toilet. In all these previous missions, the little known dirty secret is that the astronauts were using plastic bags to collect their waste. But finally they had a toilet and they didnt have to deal with the mess of taking care of their bodily functions. It had a sink where they could wash up and could shave. And it even had a shower which was essentially a tunnellike sheath that an astronaut pulled up around him and then could use water from a sprayer inside that container. But then the trick after the shower was all of the water had to be wiped off, wiped off the body, wiped off the little enclosure. And they finally decide it was more trouble than it was worth. They would just take sponge baths. But there was also room for them to have an exercise bicycle and to have some experiments set up. And then they had a huge attic above the living area where their extra supplies were stored and a lot of the systems elements were there. But it was so big that they could run track around the perimeter of it and do tumbling around the perimeter of it, just running and tumbling across the tops of the lockers. That was for fun. But they actually used that space for serious reasons too. And they were testing out a jet backpack that might be used on spacewalks. And they were able to operate that in that attic space that was so commodious. And then below their living deck floor, there was the remainder of one of the propellant tanks. And that became their big trash can. And there was a hatch and they could put their trash through the hatch and it would go down to that lower level. The orbital workshop then was the largest part of the skylab space station. But above it there was an air lock module that enabled them to go outside and to service this big observatory, the solar observatory which was a wonderful scientific facility attached to the orbital workshop. And using the instruments variety of cameras and detectors on what was called the apollo telescope mount, we got our first really detailed views of activity on the sun. And we understood for the first time how dynamic our sun is, how its just roiling with activity all the time and spewing out big explosions of matter. And it has holes in it. And it has storms on it. And it was an amazing thing to get this new information through the telescopes on skylab. And then here at the top, one can see the docking port for the apollo command and Service Module, which was essentially the shuttle craft to bring the astronauts to skylab and bring them back home again. This whole thing is 22 feet in diameter. Again, when you think of the ingenuity of turning a stage of a rocket, which is basically a big fuel tank into a home that people can live in, and you can provide them with plumbing and comfort and room to move around, a window to look out to enjoy the views of the earth, this was a kind of turning point in our Space Program. Skylab was the test run for what the next big thing was supposed to be. And from the late 1950s and early 1960s on, planners in the United States had foreseen an eventual space station. In fact, the original plans were to build a space station in earth orbit first and then go to the moon. But president kennedy reversed that and decided to send the United States to the moon first. As part of the cold war competition with the soviet union. So in the become of everybodys mind, there was still a space station. Skylab was the first step toward what now has become the International Space station. A huge new facility in earth orbit. Now this behemoth behind me is actually the backup skylab space station. It is flight ready. Nasa built two of them in case they wanted to do two Skylab Missions or in case there was some hardware problem with the first skylab orbital workshop. We did make a modification to it. Ordinarily, we dont modify flightready hardware. But this case, we cut a passage way, two doors into it and laid down a sort of hallway right through the middle of this living quarters so people who visit the knew seem can walk inside skylab. They can see the living quarters. They can look into the bathroom. They see a mannequin at the table with some food out on the table. The shower is set up there. The exercise bicycle is in plain view. They can see the trash air lock right there. And if they look up, they can just be wowed by the amount of free space there is. I mention that skylab was occupied in 1973 and 74. The last crew to leave skylab buttoned it up and put into it sleep mode with a view toward a future crew potential coming back. And then nasa got very busy developing the shuttle. So what happened to skylab . Well, gradually over time its orbit began to deteriorate somewhat.