Eighty years ago today, Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast ‘War of the Worlds’ used cutting-edge audio technology to convince listeners that planet Earth was under attack by Martians.
Sometime between her third and fourth year of her PhD program, Yi’s research ground to a halt. Her experiments were failing, she wasn’t acquiring good data, and even her friends were asking whether or not she could, or should, continue.
96-year-old Betty Dybbro was fortunate enough to spend one year as a WASP (Women Air Force Service Pilot) during World War Two, and in order to tell her story, we enlisted Katherine K. and Nithi B., two members of Amelia’s Aero Club who participate in aviation and aerospace activities at the Museum.
Did you have trouble figuring out your major when you were in college? If so, you already have one thing in common with the world’s first Korean astronaut, Soyeon Yi.
Did you know that 75% of the world’s blindness can be cured, and 89% of those cases occur in low to middle income countries? The Orbis Flying Eye Hospital works to decrease preventable and curable incidents of blindness with its mobile operating room and teaching facility.
As SpaceX and Blue Origin continue to make history by building rockets that will take future space vacationers to the Moon or Mars, the Museum is thinking about how to preserve the history of these private companies. Back in the 1960’s and up until now, it was easy for historians to access public records at NASA that documented the space race; and that’s not the case now. According to our Adjunct Curator for Space History, Geoff Nunn, “corporate archives are becoming ever more important, but private records don’t automatically make their way through the public record trail like NASA documents did.” Geoff and other space historians now have to ask themselves, “How do you archive a Slack thread?” and “What happens when YouTube goes under and we no longer have videos of launches?”
The American Fighter Aces Association preserves the memories of pilots who have sacrificed bravely for their country, and the Museum is home to its collection of artifacts and stories
Bob Jacobson, R2-D2 builder extraordinaire, claims that he wasn’t always into engineering, but the process of building his droid forced him to learn some basic and advanced techniques.
A faceless mannequin wearing a 1920s’ style dress is posed next to our Boeing model 40B, but it’s not just there for show. The mannequin represents Jane Eads, the world’s very first transcontinental commercial airline passenger.
Back in 1977, when Bob Alexander was just a young engineer, he was chosen to work on a challenging new project: the Hubble space telescope.
