Inside the National Air and Space Museum with Margaret Weitekamp

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to AMSEcast. As we prepare for America’s upcoming semiquincentennial, we’re continuing our series on 250 years of American innovation, and one story that we must tell is that of America’s leadership in flight and in the exploration of space.

0:51 So, it’s my pleasure to welcome as our guest in this episode Dr. Margaret Weitekamp, the curator and department chair at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Margaret earned a BA from the University of Pittsburgh, and her MA and PhD in history from Cornell. She was a Mellon fellow in the humanities and spent a year at the NASA Headquarters history office in Washington as the American Historical Association NASA Aerospace History Fellow. She began her service at the Air and Space Museum in 2004 becoming department chair of the space history department in 2019. She has been widely published, and is the author of books like Spaceships: An Illustrated History of the Real and the Imagined, written with Matthew Shindell, and Space Craze, America’s Enduring Fascination With Real and Imagined Space Flight.

1:35 Margaret, thanks so much for joining us on AMSEcast. Oh, I’m delighted to be here. I love your museum. I’m just going to start with that. You’re supposed to be kind of unbiased in these things [laugh] but no, I love the National Air and Space Museum. I was saying before we started today, that when I worked in Washington, it was a go-to destination. Certainly anyone that visited us in DC that was part of the tour, always. I recently was there starting these interviews with some folks at the National Academies of Engineering, and visited Air and Space and saw that the renovation is making great progress. Can you tell us, as we start, what are the goals of the renovation and when do you think it’s going to be completed? Yeah, I will say it’s a great privilege to get to work at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

2:19 It’s one of my favorite museums, even from being a kid. I remember coming in and going through the Skylab, and just, you know, getting to have that whole experience. And so—that would be back in the early-1980s—and now we are really working on this renovation that is designed to transform the whole museum, to really bring us into the 21st century. It’s in fact, a process that we’re calling internally ‘Transformation,’ so we’re thinking both about the revitalization of the building on the National Mall, but also the transformation of all of the exhibits. I’ll tell you that when they came to the curator some years ago and said, “We’re going to need to do this massive renovation of the physical building,” the question was, if we had to take everything out in order to do that construction and put it all back, would we put it all back the same way, and the answer, of course, if we’re any good at what we do, should be no.

3:13 New stories to tell, new objects to show you, new technologies to use to tell those stories, and really just some new science, as well as all of that other newness. And so, when visitors come to the museum, we are aiming for the 250th birthday of the nation, which is also the 50th birthday of this building, and so we are aiming to have those renovations done in 2026. And what visitors will find is that we have really renovated all of the spaces and revisited all of our content. So, even though, you know, all of the old favorites should still be there, but in new environments, telling slightly new stories.

3:55 So, for instance, we have our Exploring the Planets gallery. And that is something that, you know, we’ve always had a planets gallery. We have a department of planetary geologists on board here at the museum, in addition to our two history departments, and you usually tell that story kind of from the sun out, right, the way that we think of our solar system. And what this exploring the planets gallery does is ask you to think about what would our solar system look like if you encountered it flying in from outside our solar system, so that you would encounter first from the outside in. How does that change what we think about, what we know, how we compare our solar system to other solar systems that we now know exist throughout the galaxy and the universe.

4:38 So, that’s just one example of the ways that we’re really trying to think in fresh, new ways about the stories that we’re telling, and allow people, in that case, there’s literally a walking on other worlds immersive experience that is at the center of the gallery, and you can walk or wheel your way into that, and the latest science has been translated into video that, on walls, surrounds you, and you can imagine yourself standing on the moon or standing on Mars, or standing on an asteroid or on an icy moon around another planet. And so, I love that combination of being able to tell the story with artifacts, with art, with labels, with stories of the people doing the work, and then also using the technologies to literally immerse you in the middle of that story.

5:29 I can tell you during my visit there recently, my wife Leanne pretty much had to drag me out of that specific section because that is really cool, and a very amazing way to approach that. And again, I know the renovation is set to be done in 2026, but what you have now is phenomenal, so I hope everyone goes and sees it. We have the first half of the building open since October of 2022, and if you come in, we’ve taken down our construction wall in the middle of the building, so you can literally see across that on all of the places that we are still building. But we have eight brand-new exhibits that are already open and available, free to anyone who wants to come in our doors, as long as they have a timed ticket.

6:10 And that’s our one new thing is because we only have half the building open, we’re trying to make sure everybody has a good experience, and so we are asking people to make sure that they have a free timed ticket in order to be in the space. And again, you’re pros at that. We did that. We were in a line, but it went so quickly, and we had a great experience. You know one thing, as much as I’m a fan of air and space, I never got out to the Udvar-Hazy Center before I moved out of DC. I need to go there. What do visitors see at Udvar-Hazy [hay-zee] ? Am I saying that correctly, first of all? It’s the Udvar-Hazy [hah-zee] center. Hazy [hah-zee] . Okay, I got the—I was worried about the Udvar part, and I got the Hazy wrong [laugh] . [laugh] . Okay. So, Udvar-Hazy. Okay. Yes. So, the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center is a wonderful addition to the museum that we’ve had open since 2003, and so we are really one museum with two sites.

7:01 And being able to have a facility that is adjacent to a major international airport is a real boon for an Aviation and Space Flight Museum. It means that we can fly big things in and out, and also just gives us a wonderful place to put, literally, some of the largest things from the collection on public display. So, it’s about 45 minutes travel from downtown DC to get to the Udvar-Hazy Center, which is literally next door to Dulles International Airport. And you will see there an SR-71 Blackbird, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a flown Space Shuttle Orbiter, but also the Enola Gay, a Concorde.

7:44 It just really gives us a chance to bring out some of the largest parts of the collection and allow people to walk amongst them and really get a sense of that scale, which I think is hard to do downtown for the size of the galleries that we have, in terms of some of the biggest things that we have in the collection, but also allows you just a great experience of getting right up, almost nose-to-nose with these aircraft. I’m definitely going there. Next visit to Washington, I’m going out there for sure. Before we dive in—or should O say, fly up—to some of the topics we’re going to talk about today, can you tell me just a bit about what you do? I know, obviously awesome exhibits, but in terms of programming and your education, what does the museum do?

8:26 So, what the museum really does, in some ways, our core function is we’re an object library, right? So, the thing that we do that is that we try to collect judiciously. We can’t have one of everything, but the curator really is trying to help guide the museum in making studied, scholarly choices about objects that we can bring into the collection, to which the Smithsonian commits in perpetuity that we will take care of these things for the nation and the world. And we are, at heart, in that way, a research institution, so the curators are also publishing scholars who are doing research on these objects and with these objects, and telling that history of the importance of aviation and space flight, again, for America and the world.

9:13 And then, at some level, the whole most visited museum of the world thing is a bit of a side gig, that we get to put these things on public display, provide that interpretation for them, and then have a wonderful staff that does our education outreach. We have a podcast that’s done out of the museum. We have a television show that’s done out of the museum that’s aimed specifically at middle schoolers and timed so that it can be of a length that’s really useful in a classroom. So, we’re thinking a lot about different ages and different learning styles and how people come to things. So, in a gallery, we hope that you’ll encounter things that you can touch, as well as just see, as well as interpretive things that give you some context.

9:59 And then in our public offerings through our website, most people visit the National Air and Space Museum through our website, and from that, they get to encounter the objects, they get to read essays written by our educators and our curators, and they really can then explore broadly into the history of aviation and space flight. Really neat. So, many great things you do. I’m just thinking about, again, the history of American innovation, and how many things have happened so recently. When I first moved to Washington, DC, it was in ’92, and I remember getting my first email system and wondering, what do I do with this, right? But also as websites developed later, I guess, that decade, if I’m remembering correctly, and a lot of people saying, “Well, why in the world would we do this?” And now it’s so central to what we do here at AMSE, and certainly what you do, as well as is social media of all types.

10:49 I realized when I looked at these questions, Margaret, that I was unfair to you. I had so many—I was like a kid in a candy store thinking about what to ask you, that the first one about flight was way too broad. So essentially, the question to you is, if you look at the Wright brothers, and you go up to the supersonic, hypersonic jets that we’re looking at, we have, or we’re looking at for the future, what would you say are the key American innovations that you document and talk about at the museum, Wright Brothers up to today, that you would say those are kind of seminal moments of American innovation in flight? I’ll be challenged to hit all of the right ones, right? So, why don’t I give you—I’ll give you a couple, I can give you a few. And because we’re a museum, I’ll give them to you connected to objects.

11:33 So, we have the original 1903 Wright Flyer, which is that very first airplane. And what the Wright brothers did was not only invent an airplane, but really invent aviation. They tested. They started with designs, they sketched, they built a wind tunnel and they put models in it, they built kites that were the shape of their aircraft, and they flew the kites. They had gliders so that they had the shape and the function of the aircraft before they had it powered. So, being able to innovate in that way was iterative. They had real points where they got to a point in the process where they weren’t sure they were going to be able to crack it. They weren’t sure that you could do a sustained, powered flight, which is really what they are credited for, right?

12:18 So, not the hot air balloons or hydrogen balloons, or things like that just allow you to fly, or a glider that allows you to kind of jump off a cliff and land, hopefully on a beach or someplace soft, but starting from a point that would be at equal altitude to where you want to. And so, the Wright Brothers, I think, were really not, I think the as they are often depicted in the popular imagination, as kind of tinkerers and bicycle makers who found this thing, they were really engineers who were developing what we would now consider aeronautic engineering, just testing and wind tunnels and data and writing to places like the Smithsonian to try to get the best information that they could about what was happening in terms of that innovation.

13:04 So, I would start with the Wright brothers and their 1903 flyer. The next place that I might go, and it’s a hop, skip and a jump, we have a wind tunnel fan assembly on the wall of the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall that was a part of the Langley Research Center. That was when it was the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. So, that’s the NACA, which is a precursor to NASA. It’s the organization that gets grabbed in the late-1950s, out of which they’ve built NASA administratively. But that wind tunnel was so large that you could put whole aircraft in it. So, it wasn’t for testing models; it was for physically testing aircraft.

13:47 And one of the things that I would point out as a kind of great American innovation in terms of aviation is streamlining, really just thinking about how you make aircraft more efficient, more powerful. And so, to say, you know, during the Second World War, there were all kinds of tests of new aircraft, of existing aircraft, that were done in that Langley full-scale tunnel, which does not still exist, in that wind tunnel fan assembly, which is immense. People always want to know, you know, what airplane is that from because it looks like a giant airplane propeller, but it’s in fact, for a wind tunnel. And what they did was put whole aircraft into that full-scale tunnel, and then really think about streamlining, about efficiency, about pockets of air, about making things be able to go faster, go better.

14:35 Some years ago, for an anniversary of the end of the Second World War, they did a big flyover in Washington, DC, and the pace of change during that war in terms of aviation, was so visibly, viscerally apparent. You start with these little biplanes, Stearman biplanes, that are kind of putt-putt-putting along and those were the initial trainers that existed at the beginning of the war. And by the end of the war, you not only have trainers and pursuits and fighters, but then you have these big four-engine bombers that kind of flew down in Washington, DC, as a part of this illustration of what had been done in the Second World War.

15:20 And you could hear them coming before they—you know, just the growl of those motors. And the way that, even as massive as those machines are, they’re moving, compared to what you could do with these little putt-putt biplane trainers when you started. And so, I would talk about that general infusion of knowledge and expertise that went into a complete transformation of aviation in the Second World War. It is really something that I think is distinctive, drew on so many areas of American society, and I love that we have that wind tunnel fan assembly as one way of beginning to tell that very, very big story through one object.

16:06 Really interesting. And you’re reminding me, when I was there, it was my wife’s first visit to Air and Space Museum, and she does not come from a science background, and she said, explain to me how you went from the Wright Brothers plane that looks almost like a toy, to that, to the Blackbird, whatever that is, in that short amount of time? And it is a pretty phenomenal story. It’s a really amazing story, and I love—we’ve got a wonderful new gallery on early flight, and really shows you, I think—they’ve got tons of models in that gallery, and part of the point of that was to show you, in a way that you couldn’t do if you’re putting full-size craft in, even if they still existed, how much experimentation was happening in those early years of aviation.

16:50 You know, if a biplane is more stable than a monoplane, what about a triplane? Can you go as many as five wings? What is the best shape for a propeller? What is the best way to construct an aircraft motor? You know, how do you end up with the kind of V-motors versus a rotary engine? Being able to really just think about all of the kinds of experimentation that were happening in those early years. And then we have a wonderful hall, America by Air, right in the middle of the building, and as it is open now, and it really starts to tell that story of, how do you go from that early, early flight to airlines, right? To something where, if you can get yourself to an airport, and there’s pretty much an airport connected to almost—even a small airstrip—connected to almost every city in this country.

17:37 You can be anywhere in the world in about 24 hours. And that’s an extraordinary story to be able to tell of, you know, how does that become a commercial concern? How does that go from being something that only the elites could do to almost anyone you meet has been on an airplane, and most children anymore have been flown someplace to see a relative, to go on a vacation. So, it has really transformed how we live, what our expectations are. And those kinds of stories we tend to chop up into a period and be able to tell a little bit about that. So, the interwar between World War I and World War II, that period where you really have barnstorming and, you know, record-setting flights, and a lot of the streamlining that starts to be done starts in the 1920s, 1930s.

18:30 And you see that in the aircraft, and you see that in designs for toasters, you know, that people [laugh] were experimenting with that streamlined modern esthetic. I’m very excited about that gallery, which is going to be one of the first to open in our series of new galleries that’ll be coming by the end of this year, 2025. Wonderful. Let’s perhaps take the same approach with the lunar program. The one or two items that you—artifacts that you have, that you display or you have in your collection that help tell that story of us, American innovation, getting us to the moon. The new Destination Moon gallery is really the story of how did Americans get to the moon in the 1960s, and kind of, what’s happening there now.

19:16 And not only the what, but the why and the how of getting to the moon with the Apollo program in the 1960s. So, we start with the whole wall that’s about the cultural history of understanding the moon as a place. Before you can go there, you have to even envision that that spot in the sky is a place, like, the kind of place that we could stand on. And that story goes back to the 1600s and the invention of the telescope, and beginning to imagine, as early as the 1630s, that the moon was a place, the way that the Earth is a place, and that you could potentially stand on it, and that you can imagine these fictional stories of going there.

20:01 And then from there, we really jumped through the 1960s with the political decision by Kennedy before the joint session of Congress in May of 1961, “We are going to the moon,” and as the astronauts always point out, the important part of that phrase was to, “Send men to the moon by the end of the decade and return him safely to the earth.” And then, you know, what are all of the technologies that needed to happen for that? So, we are fortunate enough to have Neil Armstrong’s lunar spacesuit on display in front of the Columbia command module that brought Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins to the moon and back in 1969. And then, just reminding people also that it wasn’t a one-off flight.

20:43 There were flights through to Apollo 17—including 13 that didn’t land. But you go back to starting with Apollo 9, Apollo 10, Apollo 8, all of these other earlier missions that set the stage. I think I’m always pleased with the ability to tell those stories not only through artifacts—so the space suit, the command module, we have training model of a Lunar Roving Vehicle, which was what was used on the moon in 15, 16, 17, in order for the astronauts to be able to go a little more quickly. They didn’t actually go farther; they went more quickly to where they wanted to go because they wouldn’t ever drive farther than they could walk back, which, if you think about it, is a good mission plan.

21:28 And then we have Gene Cernan’s Apollo 17 boots, his over shoes that were the last human boots to stand on the moon in December of 1972. And then we really are telling that story about, you know, what are we planning now with Artemis, with this return to the moon? So, I love that as a whole series of innovations that are told, not only through the artifacts and the technology, but also through a sense of what was the culture at the time, who were the people who were making these decisions, who were doing this work? It’s a wonderfully rich gallery. Frankly, it’s a little hard to tour people through because there’s about 78 places where I want to stop and tell a long story.

22:10 Yes, I understand that. On a smaller scale here at AMSE, I fully understand that. Let’s go to the Space Shuttle Program. I remember, I was in high school—I’m dating myself—when the first shuttle went up, we all stopped everything and rolled the TVs out—those were those days—and watched it go up. You have a space shuttle. How do you present that at Udvar-Hazy? And then, how would you summarize the impact of the shuttle on our understanding of Earth and of space? Well, the museum is extraordinarily proud to have the flown space shuttle orbiter Discovery. Tragically the Challenger, and then later the Columbia space shuttles, of the five orbiters that were created, those two were lost in tragic accidents in 1986 and in 2003.

22:54 And so, what we have is really a part of a nationwide strategy of how you explain the capabilities of the space shuttle. And so, if you go down to Florida, NASA’s visitor center there at the Kennedy Space Center, has the space shuttle Atlantis, and it is posed really as if it’s in orbit. It has its payload bay doors open, which was necessary to dissipate heat when you were in orbit on the orbiter, and it is tilted up at an angle that makes it look very dynamic as if it’s in space. We’ve got colleagues who are out at the California Science Center, out in Los Angeles, who are in the process of completing the construction of—they’ve taken the Space Shuttle Endeavor, another flown orbiter, and stood it up, and they are displaying it as if it’s in launch configuration, which is with two solid rocket boosters and an external tank, and the engineering required to show off that capability of the shuttle that it launched like a rocket is a really extraordinary thing, especially in an earthquake zone.

23:59 So, they have it seismically isolated. I have seen pictures, and I’ve had colleagues go out and take a look at how that construction is going, and that’s going to be magnificent. For our part then, what we have is the most intact, most accurate representation of what an orbiter looked like when it finished a mission. As close as we could get to, it just stopped flying, it lands like an airplane, put the chocks around the wheels, and as close as we could get to that fully intact orbiter is really what our curators’ goal was at the time. So, I think you can really, by being that close to the vehicle, see the scorch marks on those tiles that were a part of the heat system, and I think you can get then that sense of the life of the vehicle, right, that something that would launch like a rocket, be in orbit, and have this capacity of being a lab base and a launch base for satellites and for repair, for all different kinds of versatile missions with multiple people in orbit at the same time, and then coming back, bringing that whole thing back to Earth.

25:08 So, the shuttle had a remarkable capacity for not only launching, but what we would now call down mass, right, being able to bring things back to Earth. So, you had that ability to put a laboratory module in the payload bay, fly it in space, and bring it back down. To be able to bring multiple people up to space, eventually to the International Space Station, and then rotate people, and bring them back down. That ability to come back from space with quite so much cargo and as big a crew compliment was really a distinctive thing about the space shuttle orbiter’s program, and a rather remarkable capacity for the US to run between 1981 and 2011.

25:55 Truly spectacular what they were able to accomplish. You reminded me, talking about your space shuttle, and amazing to say, “I have a space shuttle in my collection,” but for ongoing programs. So, when we go back to the moon, those types of things, how do you do that collection with NASA? Is that something you say right up front, “Hey, we would like to have this,” or how does that work? NASA always has their operational needs that are first and foremost for what they are doing, but they have been remarkably cooperative. NASA has itself a wonderful history program to preserve and write its own history. But they have not necessarily held an internal agency capacity for artifacts, right?

26:37 When they’re working with things, it’s because they’re launching them, they’re flying them, they’re doing the doing. And so, they have their visitor centers, which are remarkable places to be able to tell these stories, and then they also have a robust system of working with museums across the country and around the world in terms of thinking about where excess property should go. So, we tend to start our object-based exhibits at the museum with the things. We want to be able to show it, not tell it, so one of the things that people often ask is, you know, “Well, why don’t you just kind of put up pictures or to do movies or things like that?” And because part of what makes the National Air and Space Museum special is you get to come and see the real things, and we are as close to the real as we can be. For instance, I’ve got a colleague will always point out that the Mars rovers that we have on display in the Exploring the Planets gallery are not models; those are Mars rovers.

27:37 They’re just not on Mars, right? So, to the extent that we can get a flight spare, something that otherwise could have flown, but it wasn’t the one chosen to fly, it’s the one kept on Earth for testing or as a flight spare duplicate, then that’s a place where we’re looking at trying to get the most authentic object to be able to fit those dual needs of not only exhibit and display in education, but also research, right? That we should be an object library such that, years from now, if people have questions about how something was done, they can come back and actually look at the objects that we’ve collected.

28:18 So, for instance, various NASA scientists and engineers over the years have come to look at our spacesuits, and to see how the lunar regolith, how that lunar dust, worked its way into the fibers of the Apollo spacesuits, and then thinking about that when they’re trying to build a next generation spacesuit that would be going back to the lunar surface. Or they come and they want to see the heat shields that were used—the ablative burning off heat shields that were a part of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft, and then thinking about that next generation heat shield. It’s one thing to have Julia Child’s cookbook and the instructions for how to do the thing, and it’s another thing, if somebody had a pot of her beef bourguignon, and you could come and taste it and kind of poke around and take a look at, you know exactly how was it put together?

29:11 We, then, as a research institution, are keeping these objects, not only for their power to preserve this history and to educate people by putting them out on display, but also because the research pieces that we know that people in the future may need to come back to fully understand the history of aviation and spaceflight. You mentioned the International Space Station. I wondered, from your research, your experience at Air and Space Museum, we obviously had a great deal of international competition in the race to the moon. And I hear people now saying, well, we have to do this because the Chinese may go to the moon or to Mars, that type of thing. What have you seen as the role of international competition versus collaboration, like we see on the space station, in terms of moving innovation forward?

29:58 I think that we’ve seen a large shift in science as well as technology, in terms of moving from, kind of, isolated laboratories to then more collaborative projects that often include international partners, and certainly the International Space Station came together in the 1990s in a moment when the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, which had great experience in long-duration space flight, a whole series of space stations flown in the 1970s and 1980s, and so, you know, great wealth of practical experience that had been culminating in the Mir space station at the time, and thinking about what the next generation station should be, and seeing that as a vehicle that something that’s stronger because it’s done internationally and collaboratively.

30:54 And so, that has really been the hallmark for thinking about what’s next in terms of going back to the moon with the Artemis program. But you can even look in astronomy with something like the Event Horizon Telescope, where it was really a project to visualize, to image, a black hole, and that came from gathering images, gathering data from telescopes all over this globe to then try to crunch those together. I couldn’t explain science or technology of what they did other than knowing that it really took that global effort on a scientific basis to then collaborate and put that remarkable image together of actually being able to see a black hole, to image that.

31:45 So, it is a story that we are looking forward to telling. We’ve got an exhibit that’s coming up called Discovering Our Universe, and one of the things that you will see in that is not only a history of the science of astronomy and how we know, what kinds of questions were being asked, what kinds of instruments were being used to answer them, but also you’ll see a little bit of this path from the kind of singular astronomer, perhaps working, John Herschel and his wife Caroline, working on his observations and her helping him to put all of that together, to now these kind of large multinational groups that are really doing the science today.

32:26 So, it’s a story that we tell broadly at the museum, but especially in Discovering Our Universe, it will be, I think, something that will be very evident to visitors. We spoke on an earlier AMSEcast with Heino Falcke about his book as part of that effort to take that amazing image of the black hole. It’s beautiful and scary at the same time [laugh] when you look at that image. So, a question I meant to ask you a bit earlier is about the role of the private sector now in space, and how do you interact with great innovations we see now on the private sector side? Are those items you’re collecting as well? Is that a story you’re telling as well? It certainly is a story that we’re telling. And one of the stories that we’re telling also is that, you know, the private sector has always been involved in space flight.

33:10 So, one of the things that I collected myself in our Social and Cultural History of Space Flight collection, which is our memorabilia of the space flight efforts, as well as our space science fiction objects, but we have a jacket that has McDonnell embroidered across the back of it, and that comes from the company that built the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft. And if you look at the pictures of the Mercury spacecraft, for instance, there’s a famous one of John Glenn being helped into the spacecraft in a test. He’s in his full suit, and he’s being helped in, to kind of, get used to the in and out of getting in and out of the vehicle.

33:52 Literally, the person who is holding him up off the ground and helping him into that vehicle is wearing a coverall that says McDonnell across the back of it. So, one of the stories that we’re telling is not only about these innovative new companies that are working in aerospace and really thinking about how they do this with NASA as a major client, but also with other clients, so not only as a contractor to NASA, but selling this kind of technology and capability more broadly. But we’re also looking at the ways that under much more restrictive contracts in the 1960s where they really were thinking about NASA as the, kind of, main and only client for these kinds of technologies, you had companies—North American Aviation, McDonnell—that were a part of doing this work for a very long time.

34:49 And you see that in military and national security space, as well as planetary exploration, as well as human spaceflight. I know a part of that also is the system of satellites we now have circling the globe. Could you perhaps comment on how those satellites are utilized in some general ways, and American innovations that have been evident in the satellite industry, if that’s the right word, since Sputnik went up in, what, ’57? It’s kind of amazing to think, given how much we now live on a world that is ringed by constellations of satellites, that there was a moment in, you know, early-1957 where none of that existed.

35:30 Sputnik, as you mentioned, the Soviet satellite, being the very first one in October of 1957 and, you know, then moving very quickly. I think that I don’t know that people always recognize how much we rely on that kind of satellite information on a daily basis, in terms of being able to navigate via GPS, which is, you know, in your theme of American innovations, is a very, very strong one. It not only makes it kind of safer for vehicles to move, for you to know where you can find a cup of coffee or which is your off ramp, it has military applications, which has been life saving for understanding where fighters are and being able to understand the landscape of a battle.

36:21 So, I think we’ve got those constellations of satellites that tell us about weather in a way that you look back to the early-20th century, not really knowing if a storm was coming to Galveston, Texas, or somewhere in the Midwest to now, you know, I get an alert that says it’s going to rain where you are in 20 minutes, and I can kind of gauge like, do I think I could get myself indoors in the next 20 minutes, or do I need to, you know, make sure I have my umbrella with me? That kind of knowledge is really, I think, transformative for how people live their daily lives, with understanding all kinds of things about where we are and how we’re living.

37:03 Not to trivialize the very much more important uses of those technologies, I just remember driving around Los Angeles with a Thomas guide open on my lap, which was not a safe thing to do, but that was only way to get your way around. Or even in the early days of the internet, having your, kind of, MapQuest directions printed out, and that was all fine and good, as long as you made every single turn, but if you really made a wrong turn, someplace where you didn’t know where you were, you could be a block off your directions and have no idea how to get back on your path. So yes, the ability to punch a destination in and even dynamically to be able to then have that app.

37:43 And, you know, some of these technologies are very land based, and some of them are very space based, but to be able to dynamically say, “Oh, there’s a lot of traffic there. Go around it this way,” is a really complex technological story of, you know, of computing, as well as those kinds of feedback loops that are coming from lots of different cars’ GPS systems. Thank God I have it now or otherwise I’m lost forever. It’s ama—not to bore people with my personal life—at one point my life, for about a year, I was acting director of the FDR Presidential Library Museum in Hyde Park, New York. A wonderful place, but I would have to fly from Washington up to La Guardia and drive from there up to Hyde Park. That’s when I had to print out directions.

38:24 And Margaret if in any time I’d had to deviate from that, I would still be lost somewhere in New York [laugh] . [laugh] . I would have been hopelessly lost. But now it’s a different world, thanks to those satellites. You know, in Oak Ridge, we’re very proud of the role—we’re proud a lot of things here—but the role we played in fueling the Voyager missions. I wonder if you can talk about some of the ways Air and Space Museum teaches about those and other unmanned missions. That’s a really important part because I think some of the earliest visions of going into space were very constrained by the idea that it would have to be a person on board a vehicle, with a film camera taking pictures. And very quickly, you end up with these wonderful innovations where, you know, we can send versions of ourselves out into the universe to, in that case, in fact, out of our own solar system, to be able to take those pictures.

39:16 So, Voyager One and Voyager Two launched in 1977 to take advantage of this wonderful alignment of planets that was going to allow amazing scientific imagery. I heard Ed Stone, who’s one of the lead scientists on Voyager, was at the museum years ago, and he pointed out that that alignment had only previously been available essentially to humanity, the previous instance of it was under Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, and he just missed the boat altogether and didn’t take any advantage [laugh] . He did a lot of interesting things in his life, but he missed the boat. He did, [laugh] right. So, I love those vehicles because they’re still in communication.

39:57 The ability of humanity to, you know, put some part of ourselves so far out that they’ve actually left our solar system. We can document that they have exceeded the heliopause, the outside of the envelope of the solar wind that comes from our star. I love also that they’re signed, right? We’ve got the Voyager interstellar record on them, we’ve got some symbols on them that tell anyone who might encounter them a little bit about, you know, who we are, where we came from, the recordings of music with images of Earth. And so, I think they’re wonderful scientific vehicles, but they’re also kind of wonderfully optimistic cultural vehicles of who we are in trying to, you know, these early efforts in the 1970s to complete a survey of our own solar system, but then also think about these emissaries that we’re sending even farther out.

40:52 And to think that we accomplished that in the ’70s, before so many of the advances we have today in computers and AI and that type of thing. And I think I will say to you, Margaret, as I’m pretty sure you’re a fellow Star Trek fan, my only concern is if [unintelligible] suddenly becomes self-aware, and then we have a problem, right? So, those listeners who may have watched Star Trek will know what I’m talking about. Now, you mentioned earlier, obviously the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and we’ve faced other horrible loss of life in the space program through the years, other mistakes and failures. How have we learned from those mistakes? How has NASA and other entities in the government and private sector learned from those mistakes? Well, one of them, obviously, was the Apollo 1 fire, thinking about those three astronauts who were lost in what was called a plugs-out test, which essentially means that before you go into space, you need to test the vehicle in a way that you literally unplug it and make sure that everything still works.

41:44 And so, that was on the pad, and tragically, there was a fire in the spacecraft. And one of the painful lessons learned was that that hatch opened inward, not outward, and they were not able to then get those gentlemen out. And we actually have in the destination Moon exhibit, side by side, the two different hatches, what was used before in the Apollo program, until the that fire, and then how that was completely redesigned and rethought for, you know, for safety, for ease of egress. They were worried initially about making sure everything was sealed enough to keep everything in and they hadn’t thought about the eventuality of needing to get out quickly.

42:24 And so, I think you see not only that technological shift, but also a shift in mindset. We know that Gene Kranz sat with mission control and said, you know, “Tough, but competent.” You know, “This will not happen again and we will work through all of the mission rules and figure out what we need to know in advance to be able to make the best decisions that we can.” So, I think something that’s important to keep in mind when you’re talking about human spaceflight is that it’s always dangerous, and so that safety culture is so important, and thinking about redundancies, but also just always recognizing the tremendous risk of lives in order to put them on top of essentially giant explosions that are sufficient to throw them off the surface of this planet, into orbit or even into another direction, trans-lunar injection.

43:23 And so, it’s both the story that we try to tell in terms of understanding the remarkable achievements of human spaceflight, and it’s also the, kind of, shadow of what we see with the amazing things that have been done in planetary exploration, of thinking about, you know, how do we do it without the person? What can we send, even to the point of, we’ve got a test vehicle for the Ingenuity helicopters. Humanity has flown a helicopter on another planet, and not just once, but multiple, dozens of times. And so, being able to create something like that, and think about, how does that offer, literally, a new perspective on what we can see when we go to another place.

44:06 The Dragonfly mission that’s being planned is essentially a plan to fly a quadcopter in the atmosphere of Titan, a moon in the outer planets. And so, that kind of ingenuity that comes when you have to protect human life, how do you come up with the technologies that allow you to do quite so much remotely and be able to learn as much as we have? I do believe—I may be wrong—I think Jani Radebaugh is on our National Advisory Committee as part of that Dragonfly Project. It’s a really exciting project. Ellen Stofan, who’s the undersecretary for science here at the Smithsonian, is a part of that team as well.

44:47 So, we’re always interested in being able to not only preserve and tell those histories, but the ways that Smithsonian, as a research organization, has active scientists and engineers who are part of these teams. I’m going to ask you an unfair question here as we near the end. As all the items you have, all the artifacts you have, all the topics you talk about, what’s made the biggest impression on you since you’ve been at Air and Space? What do you say, Wow? What’s the biggest wow moment for you? Senator John Glenn was kind enough years ago to lend his name to our premier space flight lecture, and he used to come personally and be at the reception and do the introductions for that. And for that then, I think I gained a new appreciation for what he did when he flew with the Mercury program in 1962 and became the first American to orbit the Earth.

45:37 Just the risk taken with that within a year before his launch on an Atlas rocket, he had watched an Atlas blow up on the pad. The willingness to—he would say everything had been fixed. He had confidence that they had worked it out, but just the size of that vehicle, also. We have that on display in the Boeing Milestones of Flight hall. That will open later this year and bring that back to public view. And it’s only six feet in diameter. It’s really small. And I love also that, you know, we know up on the, essentially, the dashboard of that vehicle, there’s a small paper eye chart.

46:19 They really weren’t sure if during orbit, his eye might change shape so much that he would have trouble seeing, and so part of the test was to repeatedly read from this little paper eye chart that had been added to the vehicle, along with various checklists that have been added for him to be able to keep track of what he was needed to do. So, I would say Friendship 7, which is John Glenn’s 1962 Mercury spacecraft, is a personal favorite of mine because he was personally such a fine gentleman and so knowledgeable about just not only what he’d done, but what was being done in space flight, and a wonderful supporter of that lecture series to get that information out.

47:03 Godspeed, John Glenn, of course. And of course, he went on to a long career in the US Senate after that. So again, one more unfair question. So, when we look to the future, and as an historian, as you look at these great case examples from the past, is there any lesson you would learn from those, say this is something we should bear in mind as we go into the next 100 years, next 250 years? I think I’m so impressed by the pace of change in recent years, of going from, you know, within living memory, the kind of, first steps into space at all to being able to put humans on the moon, starting in 1969, and then the great pace of change in planetary science, of exploration in the 1970s into the 1980s, a robust system like the shuttle, and through to the year 2011.

47:56 I think the challenge of space flight is always that you’re trying to marry innovation with reliability, right? It needs to be really reliable and robust, and in some ways, that cuts against the impulse to innovate, to break, to do the next thing. And so, I would say, as a community of historians here, there are about a dozen of us in space history, about a dozen curators in aeronautics, we’re always kind of with eyes in two different directions, that we’re looking at what’s been done in the past and what’s available to allow us to tell those stories, to preserve those stories, to bring them to the public. And then really, we’re avid readers of the current literature, in terms of military national security space, or looking at planetary exploration, looking at the number of launches that are happening right now, and then, thinking about, you know, how do we tell those stories of innovation in the museum?

48:56 So, I think it’s a remarkable time to be working in this field, even as a scholar, trying to be more of a neutral observer. We’ve had more launches in the past few years than you had in the entire space age, running up to that. So, that pace of change, that ability to put things reliably into orbit and bring things back, and also to build out that constellation as a global environment of satellites that are telling us so much about ourselves and about what the rest of the solar system looks like. I don’t know it’s an easy answer for you, so much as to say it’s a fascinating time to be working on the edges of that as a scholar and trying to think about, you know, how we judiciously preserve the best parts of that to make sure that we can continue to learn from it.

49:51 Margaret, as we end a very fascinating conversation, how can our listeners learn more about what’s going on at the Air and Space Museum? airandspace.edu is our website, and I hope that people will set aside some time when they come and take a look because you’ll find not only things about our public programming, you’ll find resources for teachers and students, but you’ll also really be able to dig into the collection and learn about particular objects. And we have a wonderful library now of the blog posts that have been written by curators, by staff, about current events, about anniversaries, about objects, about, you know, trends that we’re seeing in science and technology.

50:32 So, that’s really the best way. And then, you know, follow us on social. We have a wonderful set of reels that are on Instagram and on Facebook. I’m the star of our latest one, which was about the Close Encounters of the Third Kind mothership model that we have on display at the Udvar-Hazy center, so that’s a fun little bit. So, we’re always thinking about different ways that we can get what we know out to the public, and sometimes it’s in a tweet or a reel, and sometimes it’s a scholarly book that, you know, took one of our scholars years to put together. And sometimes it’s a wonderful conversation on a podcast. Well, it has indeed been wonderful. Margaret, thank you so much for joining us on AMSEcast.

51:13 Oh, this was a treat. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center in person. You can also shop at our online store and become a member at AMSE.org. Thanks to our production team with Matt Mullins, plus our supportive colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Office of Environmental Management, and Office of Legacy Management, as well as Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, NNSA, and the AMSE Foundation.

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