Visitors to the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center will get their first chance to explore the remarkable holdings in its newly filled space hangar on Monday, Nov. 1.

Although the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. opened to much acclaim last December, the 53,000-square-foot James S. McDonnell Space Hangar was inaccessible because of the needed refurbishment of its centerpiece, space shuttle Enterprise.  With that project now completed, hundreds of other artifacts have been installed in the exhibition hall, from a 69-foot floor-to-ceiling Redstone missile to tiny “Anita,” a spider carried on Skylab for web formation experiments.

The hangar and its holdings illustrate the scope of space exploration history as organized around four main themes: rocketry and missiles; human spaceflight; application satellites and space science.

“The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has always been known as the home of the icons of flight. The James S. McDonnell Space Hangar at the Udvar-Hazy Center gives us the chance to share much more of our vast collection as we present the story of space exploration in richer detail,” museum director Gen. J.R. “Jack” Dailey said.

A total of 113 large space artifacts are housed in the hangar. The biggest and heaviest, including Enterprise, an instrument ring segment of a Saturn V rocket that was never built and a Space Shuttle main engine are displayed at ground level. An array of cruise missiles, satellites and space telescopes hangs from above.

The hangar features two elevated overlooks that allow visitors to study suspended artifacts straight-on and ground-level displays from above.

More than 500 smaller artifacts are exhibited in customized cases throughout the hangar including advanced spacesuit prototypes; research crystals formed in orbit; sounding rocket payloads; space-themed toys from the 1950s and 1960s and even borscht in tubes, prepared for Soviet cosmonauts.

The oldest artifact in the hangar, the Ritchey Grinding Machine, dates back to the 1890s, when it was used to craft a 60-inch mirror for a Wisconsin observatory telescope. The newest artifact is an engineering model created by U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen as they developed, for a class project, the PCSat communications satellite launched in 2001 and still in orbit.

Many of the objects now in the space hangar had been in storage for decades. A portion was previewed over the past months in the Udvar-Hazy Center’s aviation hangar.

The museum’s unparalleled space collection is built on an agreement that gives the Smithsonian first option to acquire any equipment used and then retired by NASA. The collection includes every retired American spacecraft that flew humans and returned safely to Earth; every spacesuit used to walk on the moon and backups or engineering models of nearly every major American satellite or probe.

Space artifacts from other nations have been donated by individuals and governments or are displayed on loan.

Other unique artifacts now exhibited in the McDonnell Space Hangar include:

  • the manned maneuvering unit used for the first-ever untethered spacewalk
  • a film return capsule from the last Corona satellite spy mission over the U.S.S.R.
  • the flotation collar and bags used for the Apollo 11 splashdown
  • a Gemini paraglider research vehicle used to train for potential ground landings
  • Pegasus, the first aircraft-launched rocket booster to carry satellites into space
  • a form-fitting centrifuge seat made exclusively for Mercury astronaut John Glenn
  • a full-scale engineering prototype of the Mars Pathfinder Lander
  • a human-sized, NASA-built android used for 1960s spacesuit testing
  • the Spartan 201 satellite, deployed for solar research during five shuttle missions

The McDonnell Space Hangar is named for aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell, whose company built a number of pioneering aircraft and both the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft, flown by the first American astronauts.
The museum plans to install additional artifacts in the hanger over the next few years.

This fall, to mark the Udvar-Hazy Center’s first anniversary (Dec. 15), 21 additional aircraft will be added to the 82 currently on display in the Udvar-Hazy Center’s aviation hanger. They include the Westland Lysander IIIA airplane, used for ferrying secret agents in and out of enemy territory during World War II; and the Bell H-13J, which, in 1957, became the first helicopter to carry a U.S. president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The museum will celebrate the Udvar-Hazy Center’s first anniversary on Saturday, Dec. 11. Visitors to the facility will enjoy live entertainment, “story times” for children, free tickets to the new IMAX film “Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag,” astronaut appearances, book signings and behind-the-scenes presentations by restoration and exhibits specialists.

Since its opening, the Udvar-Hazy Center has attracted more than 1.5 million visitors, making it the most popular museum site in Virginia.

Although admission to the Udvar-Hazy Center is free, there is a $12 fee for parking. The museum operates a shuttle bus between its flagship building on the National Mall in Washington and the Udvar-Hazy Center. A roundtrip ticket for the shuttle bus is $7 (the price will increase as of Jan. 1, 2005), with discounts available for groups.

The National Air and Space Museum building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., home to John Glenn’s Mercury spacecraft Friendship 7, the Apollo 11 command module Columbia, an unflown lunar module, the backup Skylab orbital workshop and a touchable moonrock obtained during Apollo 17, is located at Sixth Street and Independence Avenue S.W. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is located in Chantilly off Route 28 near Washington Dulles International Airport. Both facilities are open daily from 10 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. (Closed December 25.) and admission is free.