I’m a highschool student and want to be an aerospace engineer in the near future. I’m trying to make a presentation about traveling in the states.

I would love to make a connection between aerospace engineering and traveling.

Are there any historical sites related to aerospace engineering like the johnson space center or the smithsonian museum?

19 comments

  3. Unironically area 51, lots of stuff science is done there. The Boeing plants in Washington are good. Also the Kennedy Space Center.

  5. The Museum of Flight in Seattle has a lot of good exhibits on flying but related to history, it has some of the buildings and equipment from when Boeing first started manufacturing aircraft.

  6. Are you actually traveling to these places or just planning a trip for a school project? The US is filled with places of aeronautically and historically significant sites. If you are planning to go to these places you’d want to consider how far you can travel. These aren’t in particular order after the first 2 in terms of historic significance, and these are just highlights I can think of, off the top of my head. Aerospace historic sites is something the US is not short on.

    1. Kitty Hawk, NC is where the Wright brothers first flew

    2. )Dayton, OH is the bicycle shop where the weight brothers worked out of.

    3) USAF museum at Wright Patterson AFB (near Dayton OH) is full of one of a kind and ionic aircraft an aerospace artifacts… like early wind tunnels. Not really a site but more like has a lot of historically significant items.

    4) Cape Canaveral, FL is where we went to the Moon

    5) Huntsville, AL is where NASA rockets were tested

    6) Johnson Space center is where NASA Mission Control is.

    7) Smithsonian Air and Space museum on the national mall is where you’d see all the firsts, wright brothers’s airplane, spirit of St. Louis, Bell X-1, X-15, list goes on

    8) Smithsonian air and space museum Udvar Halsey Annex. IMO this location actually has more interesting historical planes than the one at the mall if you are an aerospace engineer

    9) Edward Air Force base, lots of stuff got tested here

    10) Nike missile battery at the presidio in San Francisco, this one is a hidden gem

    11) Titan missile silo in AZ

    12) every single aircraft carrier turned museum are pieces of aerospace history

    And I’m out of time to list more…

  9. I live in the South Bay of California (LA county), and there are many aerospace offices and fabrication locations within walking distance. Northrup, Boeing, Raytheon, all sorts of interesting aerospace stuff is dotted all over Southern California. If you’re ever in the area, message me, and I’d be happy to give you a list of a lot of cool stuff.

  10. Anything Wright patt. Sand dunes of first flight.

    Maybe their bicycle shop where it all started

    If you really wanna go back the Chinese invented kites like 2,000 years ago which is a form of aerospace engineering technically.

  11. Among the others already mentioned, Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, the National Museum of Nuclear Science in Albuquerque, NM and Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona.

    Spaceport America is where Virgin Galactic operates out of and made New Mexico the third state to send people into space after California and Florida.

    The other two are museums. The Nuclear Science Museum doesn’t necessarily focus on aerospace but they have planes, rockets, and missiles. It’s also a Smithsonian affiliate museum. The Pima museum has hundreds of historical aircraft. I’ve never been there but if you look up a satellite view on Google, it looks like a fun and interesting place to visit.

    White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico also has a museum and there’s also the added benefit of being able to see White Sands National Park afterward.

  12. Cape Canaveral, FL home of Kennedy Space Center. Shoot me a message and I’ll send you some photos I took when I worked there.

  14. There are a ton of good ones already mentioned, but another one I’d add to the list is Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It hosts the EAA Annual Convention and Fly-In, which the Experimental Aircraft Association hosts. It’s **THE** air show in the US and during the last week in July when it takes place, Wittman is the busiest airport in the world.

    While not historical per se, during the show it has a ton of aircraft from every decade of flight and pretty much all the aerospace companies have some sort of booth/display there. Anyone interested in aerospace at all should have the sho on their bucket list and even if you don’t know anything about airplanes, it’s still amazing.

  15. * First powered flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. There’s a museum, a monument, and an airstrip there. This is in the Outer Banks– a string of sandy barrier islands just off the coast which is also a vacation destination for beach stuff. A bit of a hassle to get there, though.
    * Glenn Curtiss museum in Hammondsport, NY– Glenn Curtiss was another early aviation pioneer, one of the chief rivals of the Wright Bros. This is in the Finger Lakes region– a cluster of very long, narrow lakes. Popular vacation destination for lake stuff, also lots of wineries nearby that make very good white wines, but you won’t be able to partake in that as a high school student.
    * Smithsonian– Reminder that there are two national Air and Space Museums– one right in downtown Washington DC, and a second one that opened about 20 years ago at the main DC airport (Dulles). They had to open the second one because the US has tons of super cool planes but they need a lot of space.
    * Desert Southwest– Someone in this thread suggested Area 51. That’s a stupid idea. It’s deep in the desert, 100 miles from anything else, and if you try to get close, guards will pop out from behind a hill and arrest you long before you’re close enough to see anything. BUT– test flights of experimental aircraft aren’t completely restricted to the military airspace. With a bit of internet research, you can find (and access) the location of a (mostly cleaned up) debris field from a crashed A-12. If you lie out under the stars in the desert, there’s a chance that you might see some lights from some top-secret spy plane– not that you’d know what it was, of course.

  17. The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum has a site downtown in DC that’s great but they have an amazing annex called the Udvar-Hazy Center that is my personal favorite. There is and entire space shuttle, the SR-71 Black Bird which is the fastest plane ever. The Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, and a Concord which was the only supersonic passenger plane and more cool stuff.

    You can go to Cape Canaveral in and get a tour there, I went on one when I was younger and I saw an armadillo for the first time too.

    There were some divers in Florida discovered a chunk of the Challenger wreck last year so if you are in to diving you might be able to see it.

    There’s an abandoned rocket testing an manufacturing site called Aerojet-Dade Rocket Facility in the Everglades in Florida. The YouTube channel The Proper People did a video exploring it. It was a facility that was building and testing rockets for the missions to the moon but they decided to go with a different company at some point in production. I think there is still the rocket they made on the site but it may have been sealed up as having an absurdly deep pit without any fences or railing around it with a decomposing rocket near a hiking trail could become a hazard as more people have learned of the site and come to check it out and could get hurt or killed trying to get down those to take a look.

  18. Check out a list of Nike missile sites for some areas you’re interested in. They’re around most major cities, and in many cases you can simply walk onto them from public parks.

  19. The Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas is a really good museum of space flight. The have the Liberty Bell 7 capsule that sank after splashdown and was recovered in 1999.

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