The Historic Aircraft And Spacecraft In The Cradle Of Aviation Museum

Excellent pictorial history of famed aircraft and aviation memorabilia depicted in 90 rare photos and illustrations: replica of Lilienthal Glider (1894), the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, America's most famous WW I airplane; Republic's P-47 Thunderbolt (1945), Grumman's Mobile Lunar Laboratory (Molab, 1964), and many other planes, spacecraft, rockets and missiles. Extensive captions.

Experience the thrill of flying some of the world's most important airplanes and spacecraft. Best of the National Air and Space Museum provides unprecedented access to the most popular museum in the world. The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum hosts an average of seven million visits every year. The Udvar-Hazy Center—three football fields long and ten stories high—receives more than one million visits annually. Best of the National Air and Space Museum features the best of both museums, from the Challenger space shuttle and the Wright flyer to the Spirit of St. Louis and the stealth bomber. Robert Van der Linden, curator of aeronautics, has selected the most important, popular, and just plain impressive aircraft and spacecraft from the collections of both museums to be showcased in this beautiful book. Each page spread includes intriguing facts of the item's design, use, mission, specifications, and dimensions. A must-have for space and aviation buffs.

"[This book] celebrates aviation's most significant achievements through the stories behind twenty-nine legendary aircraft housed at the NASM."--Jacket.

Printed to coincide with a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition, "At the Controls" is a photographic look at the cockpits of 40 aircraft and five spacecraft of historical note. Full color. 30 archival images.

For five weeks—from April 14 to May 21, 1927—the world held its breath while fourteen aviators took to the air to capture the $25,000 prize that Raymond Orteig offered to the first man to cross the Atlantic Ocean without stopping. Joe Jackson's Atlantic Fever is about this race, a milestone in American history whose story has never been fully told. Delving into the lives of the big-name competitors—the polar explorer Richard Byrd, the French war hero René Fonck, the millionaire Charles Levine, and the race's eventual winner, the enigmatic Charles Lindbergh—as well as those whose names have been forgotten by history (such as Bernt Balchen, Stanton Wooster, and Clarence Chamberlin), Jackson brings a completely fresh and original perspective to the race to conquer the Atlantic. Atlantic Fever opens for us one of those magical windows onto a moment when the nexus of technology, innovation, character, and spirit led so many contenders from different parts of the world to be on the cusp of the exact same achievement at the exact same time.

In 1961, after the United States had acquired a total of fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience, President John F. Kennedy announced his plans for landing a man on the moon by 1970. The space race had begun. In 1962, after a strenuous competition, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation of Bethpage, Long Island, had won the contract to build the lunar module-the spacecraft that would take Americans to the moon. This was the first, and the only, vehicle designed to take humans from one world to another. Although much has been written about the first men to set foot on the moon, those first hesitant steps would not have been possible without the efforts of the designers and technicians assigned to Project Apollo. Building Moonships: The Grumman Lunar Module tells the story of the people who built and tested the lunar modules that were deployed on missions as well as the modules that never saw the light of day. This is the first publication to chronicle the visual history of the design, construction, and launch of the lunar module-one of the most historic machines in all of human history.