Come fly with me: National Air and Space Museum tracks mankind's mission in the sky.

• Position: Aeronautics

The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum maintains the world's largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft among some 50.000 artifacts that range in size from Saturn V rockets to jetliners to gliders to space helmets to microchips.There also is a wide swath of fascinating flight photography. The museum is a center for historical research on aviation, spaceflight, and related science and technology. It also is home to the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, which performs original research and outreach activities on topics covering planetary science, terrestrial geophysics, and the remote sensing of environmental change.

There are two public display facilities. The museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., which opened in July 1976, houses many of the icons of flight, including the original 1903 Wright-Flyer, Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis. Chuck Yeager's Bell X-l, John Glenn's Friendship 7 spacecraft, the Apollo 11 command module, and a lunar rock sample that visitors can touch. Since opening, the building on the Mall has been the most visited museum facility in the world, attracting, on average, more than 9,000,000 people annually.

Meanwhile, the museum's Steven R Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., which began operation in December 2003, permits the display of many more artifacts in an open, hangar-like setting, including a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, a Concorde, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, the "Dash 80" prototype for the 707, the sole-surviving Boeing 307 Stratoliner, and the space shuttle Enterprise.

Work on the museum's artifacts takes place at the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility in Suitland, Md., which no longer is open to the public. The Udvar-Hazy Center ultimately will display most of the collection previously stored in Suitland.

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The Smithsonian's aeronautical collection began in 1876 when a group of kites was acquired from the Chinese Imperial Commission. Aeronautical artifacts were displayed in the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building and later in a nearby shed.

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