Air and Space Museum - Udvar-Hazy Center

Last Friday we had to go up to Dulles Airport (Chantilly, Virginia -- near Washington, DC) for Lon to finish his Global Entry application. (Now we both have expedited re-entry to the U.S.) While there, we finally took the time to visit the Air and Space Museum "annex" next to Dulles Airport -- officially, the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

The museum is three gi-normous hangars -- one for aviation, one for spaceflight, and one for restoration. We spent about 2 1/2 hours to get an feel for the museum. To see everything would take a full day.

With hundreds of planes and thousands of artifacts it takes a long time just to walk through once, much less really spend time at each section.

This aerobatic plane is displayed upside-down.

The Fulton "Amphibian" plane was designed so that the cockpit could become a road vehicle. James Bond aside, the concept was never successful because both the plane and the car had too many compromises.

An early Lufthansa passenger plane.

The Concorde (supersonic passenger plane), with an early PanAm passenger plane in the lower-right foreground.

As might be expected, there are a large number of military planes. This is the Enola Gay -- famous (infamous?) for the first use of an atomic weapon in the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II.

The Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird" stealth reconnaissance plane.

The SR-71 has a prominent location in the middle of the main hangar, in front of the space hangar. This photo also gives you a sense of the size of the museum.

In addition to manned spacecraft, there is a large collection of satellites -- mostly mock-ups used while designing the real things, which mostly are either still in space, or have burned up in the atmosphere.

It's nearly impossible to get a photo showing the entire space shuttle. This is the best I did.

The shuttle's rear engines.

A head-on view of the shuttle and the space hangar.