Nearly nine million people a year come to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the most visited aircraft and spacecraft collection in the world. Nearly nine million people come here every year.
Go inside and you will find, hanging from the ceiling in the first hall, the actual Wright Brothers' Flyer — the first heavier-than-air powered aircraft, which flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903, for twelve seconds. Twelve seconds. Sixty-six years later, humans walked on the moon.
Also in that hall: the Spirit of St. Louis, the aircraft Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris on May 20th, 1927, thirty-three and a half hours over the Atlantic in an aircraft with no forward windshield — he had to use a periscope to see straight ahead.
Nearby: a Moon rock you can touch, brought back by Apollo astronauts, estimated to be approximately three point eight billion years old.
The museum opened on July 1, 1976, as the centerpiece of the American Bicentennial celebrations. On opening day alone, more than one hundred thousand people walked through its doors.
The Apollo 11 command module Columbia is here — the actual capsule in which Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins orbited the Moon in July 1969. Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface in the Lunar Module. Collins remained in orbit, alone, on the far side of the Moon, for twenty-one and a half hours — the most isolated human being in history.
Touch the Apollo capsule if you get the chance. That is the vehicle that changed what human beings understood themselves to be capable of.