Join the National Air and Space Museum’s director Chris Browne and Aviation Week’s Joe Anselmo for a private tour of the revamped museum in Washington.
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AI-Generated Transcript
Joe Anselmo (00:31): Welcome to this special edition of Aviation Week's Check 6 podcast. Coming to you from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. I'm Joe Anselmo. On July 28, Air and Space will be opening five new galleries, the penultimate step in an eight-year renovation that is entirely reimagining one of the world's most visited museums. In advance of that, museum director Chris Browne has agreed to give Check 6 listeners a private tour of new galleries ahead of the opening. He joins me here and for the first time, you can also watch this Check 6 podcast on Aviation Week's YouTube channel to see what Chris is talking about. For our listeners, there's a link in your podcast description to the YouTube channel. To our YouTube viewers, welcome to Check 6. Chris, welcome.
Chris Browne (01:19): Thank you. It's great to be with you, Joe, and your listeners as well.
Joe Anselmo (01:22): Thanks for and our viewers. Yes, absolutely viewers as well. My apologies, so new to me. Thanks for making the time. A quick tutorial for our listeners as we start: The Air and Space Museum is actually two museums. It's one museum, but two buildings. It's this building which opened 49 years ago near the Capitol. And then 30 miles west of here is the Udvar-Hazy Center, which houses the much bigger airplanes that has room for space shuttle and SR-71 and the Enola Gay, a Concorde. Together, the museums draw more than 3.5 million people a year, and as soon as your renovation here is done, I expect that number's going to skyrocket even higher.
Chris Browne (02:06): Indeed, it continues to be one of the most popular museums, not just in this country, but in the world.
Joe Anselmo (02:14): And Chris, you walked us through before we sat down, this is not a touchup. This is a complete rebuild of this museum, isn't it?
Chris Browne (02:20): Yeah, that's right. And I guess I would encourage your viewers and listeners to recognize that it's not the same old museum. Forty percent of the artifacts now on display are in the museum for the first time. They've either come from the collection or on loan or from acquisitions we've made. So we are trying to tell the story as it continues to unfold, but in ways that are even more impactful with our visitors and connecting in ways that they may not be used to, including the floor that's under us right here in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall. It's a very different look and feel, and even this floor is part of an exhibit, whether it's apparent or not. We're actually on a pulsar map, which is a way of identifying yourself. Frank Drake figured this out back in '70, how you can figure out your place in the universe based on pulsating stars in their final death throes and knowing that it's sort of positioning yourself if you were a mariner with the lighthouses. We can find our place here in the gallery based on pulsars at these locations.
Joe Anselmo (03:33): And just sitting here, I'm a little awestruck, even though I've been here before. It was remodeled. That's an Apollo lander behind us, correct?
Chris Browne (03:41): Correct. There were 12 built, and this is one of the 12. It was originally going to fly low Earth orbit missions. It was repurposed to do Earth and ground testing, but that is what we would say a full-up round.
Joe Anselmo (03:56): Okay. Up right above you is the X-1, which Chuck Yeager flew at supersonic speed in 1947.
Chris Browne (04:03): Yep. Correct. And it's shaped as you would expect, like a bullet and a very audacious flight like so many that have been done here over the years. But demonstrating that supersonic flight was in fact possible and survivable.
Joe Anselmo (04:22): And up above me from 20 years earlier is the Spirit of St. Louis, which Charles Lindbergh famously flew across the Atlantic in 1927.
Chris Browne (04:29): Indeed, 33 and a half hours. He was sleep deprived when he started the flight. And it was that flight that really, aside from being greeted by 150,000 people at Le Bourget, France, it really closed the gap. I mean between the old world and the new world in a very demonstrable way, 33 hours connecting the two.
Joe Anselmo (04:52): Okay. And speaking of connections, when you were walking us through, you made some great connections of the first, what was it, 69 years of flight or?
Chris Browne (05:01): Yeah. I mean, we have here on display in one of our galleries in the Wright Brothers Gallery, the original Wright Flyer that Orville Wright flew December 17, 1903. The first flight in that airframe was 12 seconds and 120 feet and proved then this concept that you could actually defy gravity. You could use powered flight to leave the Earth. And when you think that only 66 years separate that first powered flight from the first footsteps on the moon, that's remarkable. And so what we have here in the Air and Space Museum are those various aircraft and spacecraft and objects that some incredibly courageous and heroic people used to sort of make that journey. And the X-15 above us, for instance, flown in 1959, Neil Armstrong had six flights in that airframe, and it was designed to test this boundary between atmosphere and space in advance of space.
Chris Browne (06:12): Had to know just as Chuck Yeager had to prove you could survive at supersonic speeds, that aircraft and the pilots that flew it had to prove in fact that it was possible to fly at Mach 6 and survive and fly into space. And so as I mentioned, Neil Armstrong had six flights in that. And I love to tell the story that because he was one of the 12 pilots of the X-15 that actually got into space, crossed that 50-mile boundary, he had asked if he was given astronaut wings. And so fast forward a bit, he reports to NASA for his astronaut class and he already has his astronaut wings. To me, that's the ultimate bragging rights.
Joe Anselmo (06:55): I had not heard that before. So let's talk about the new galleries. You have one just dedicated looking to the future, and that's got a lot of new material in it, obviously.
Chris Browne (07:03): Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of museums and even ourselves have tended to have this retrospective look. And as well we should for events like Destination Moon and the Apollo program and these incredible things of our past that have informed the future. But I think it's really important for visitors to be able to see what's happening now to be able to go to a museum and see some of the most current stories as they're unfolding. And so we have for the first time a gallery titled Futures and Space right here off of this gallery where it asks the basic questions, who goes to space, why go to space, and what do you do when you get there? And so through a variety of different artifacts and objects begins to sort of try to answer that question, it invites our visitors to do so. There's a space in there for astronauts and other visitors to have discussion to try to begin to answer these questions, none of which have firm concrete answers, but it's open-ended by design. So that in addition to saying having a Falcon grid fin in that display now as other develop technologies develop we'll be able to introduce them into the gallery swap out so that that gallery will continue to have a forward looking future theme that some of our galleries don't by definition.
Joe Anselmo (08:30): So tell us about the grid fin, because you were showing that to us, so we'll be able to show it to our...
Chris Browne (08:34): Yeah, I mean I think for many of your viewers and listeners, we recall not that long ago when the first booster stuck a landing and this idea of reusability, which is so fundamental to the space program now. And so essential understood these companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin and others, that to do this efficiently, you have to figure out how to reuse and return for use things like boosters. And so the grid fin off of the Falcon boosters are what guide it down to safe pinpoint landing, like right here, even, I mean not in some far off field, but it is done with incredible precision and we have an interactive in there that actually allows visitors to understand conceptually how those grid fins as they pivot on the booster, are able to guide it as it's falling even though it doesn't have wings to what is a perfect landing. And so we use interactives throughout the museum like that to try to demonstrate concepts that may not be readily apparent just...
Joe Anselmo (09:45): From viewing an object. And then you have a Blue Origin capsule in there. We do. And that's a mockup, but you're going to get a real one eventually.
Chris Browne (09:53): Right? Yeah. And again, the beauty of that gallery is that for now we've got the mockup, which was used for testing and design by Blue Origin. But once the flown capsule is available and completes its flights, it is bound to come here and we will swap it out. And so again, as the stories unfold, we will continue to introduce objects and artifacts that people are seeing unfold before their eyes and the media.
Joe Anselmo (10:25): On the flip side of the future. One of your new galleries is focused on World War I.
Chris Browne (10:29): Yes.
Joe Anselmo (10:29): Tell us a little bit about what's in there.
Chris Browne (10:32): So back to our timeline, when you think that World War I was barely a decade after the first powered flight. And so it became a real crucible of aviation at its earliest time as applied certainly in a military context. And so they were really, to use a trite phrase, pressing the envelope on what was possible with aircraft. So you see incredible development and technologies come to fruition and use in that period. And we have some of the most iconic objects and artifacts from that period, including the only Sopwith Camel remaining that was built by the Sopwith Aircraft Company, a remarkable artifact. And then we also, speaking of interactives, one of the things that they endeavored and successfully designed in World War I aviation is the idea of shooting a bullet through a rotating prop, which when you think of it is like, well, how do you do that without shooting off the prop? Well, this interactive upstairs in that gallery demonstrates to visitors the technology, all the cams and rods and push rods that had to come together to actually fire the bullet and time it so it would go between the props. It's fascinating, but it demonstrates that, okay, I guess that's how they did it.
Joe Anselmo (12:03): Yeah, it was pretty advanced technology
Chris Browne (12:05): For
Joe Anselmo (12:05): More than a hundred years ago.
Chris Browne (12:06): Indeed.
Joe Anselmo (12:06): We got to peek through the curtain. You're working on a World War II gallery that opens next July one when this renovation is complete, right?
Chris Browne (12:14): Indeed. That gallery, World War II in Aviation, the Jay Kislak World War II Gallery, and then we have several other incredible galleries, National Science Foundation, Discovering Our Universe, Textron, We All Fly, which is a very interactive gallery. We have a wind tunnel that you can walk into. It's a real learning space. So each of these galleries have a different look and feel and in many cases a different purpose. And so we hope that our visitors after the visit, after they come here, will be able to really experience aviation and aerospace in just its full gamut, its full history, its full capacity, and come out certainly as I did after visiting a year after this museum opened in 1977 inspired. And just a quick personal story, when I came here with no aspiration to fly the DC-3 that I saw, this isn't, this air building had just opened a year prior. I did what I hope all our visitors do, which is sort of see themselves in the story in some way. And I walked out those doors and true as I sit here committed to getting my pilot's license that I had within a year, and it set me off on a professional career that's led me through various walks of aviation. So I know the power of a place like this, the impact that it can have.
Joe Anselmo (13:51): Chris, for our podcast audience that's not in the DC region, what does it cost to bring a family of five to visit here?
Chris Browne (13:59): Well, are you flying? Are you driving? And are you at an Airbnb? The expense is there to come to this museum. It's free. And that hearkens back to the fact that this is the People's Museum. This belongs to the nation. And to provide free access is so fundamental to making that access possible for everybody. We do have a ticketing system, they're free, but in order that we not oversubscribe the building and make sure that people have a quality experience, we do ask that people go online and download tickets and there's no limit to that plan ahead. During the busy times, we can become fully subscribed, but our goal is to get as many people in here to enjoy and be inspired by this incredible collection.
Joe Anselmo (14:51): Final question, the Udvar-Hazy Museum I mentioned, it's an SR-71 when you walk in there. I think it's fascinating. They flew it from Los Angeles Air Force Base to Dulles Airport in one hour and four minutes, which is astounding. It really is. It'll take me longer driving home in traffic. Exactly. There's also a beautiful space wing in there. There's a bill that just went through Congress that was passed by Congress that appropriate $85 million to take that space shuttle out of that wing and move it to Houston, Texas. Are we going to walk into the Space Wing in the Udvar-Hazy Museum and just find a big empty shell?
Chris Browne (15:25): Not if I have any ability to influence that decision and others. And fundamentally, it goes to what is the national collection. And the Smithsonian was established by statute in large part to collect, curate and steward what is the national collection, what I think of as the nation's DNA, and to do that authentically and accurately in a way that is timeless and stands the test of time. You can't sort of pull from the collection. This Space Shuttle Discovery's a fundamental and essential part of that story that we tell to the nation and that we share with the nation. So to me, to remove the Discovery for points elsewhere would really be in opposition to the very purpose of the Smithsonian and what we're trying to do on behalf of the entire nation.
Joe Anselmo (16:24): Okay. Well, on that note, Chris Browne, thank you so much for your tour and your time.
Chris Browne (16:29): Great.
Joe Anselmo (16:29): Really appreciate it. Best of luck on the July 28th opening and the 50th anniversary next year.
Chris Browne (16:34): Well, thank you Joe, and my thanks to you listeners and viewers, and congratulations on this podcast now being viewable as well as heard.
Joe Anselmo (16:43): Well, thank you. That is a wrap for this special edition of Check 6. Thanks to our videographer Jeremy Kariuki who is here with me and to Guy Ferneyhough, our podcast editor in London. If you haven't already, be sure to follow Check 6 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen so you never miss an episode. If you're watching on YouTube, please consider liking this video and subscribing to our channel for more aviation content. Have a great week and thank you for your time.
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