On November 24, 1969, Yankee Clipper splashed into the Pacific Ocean four days after Pete Conrad and Alan Bean had walked on the Moon's Ocean of Storms. The capsule completed 45 lunar orbits before bringing the crew home. Decades later it landed in Hampton, in a Space Gallery you enter through a room that simulates a crewed launch to Mars. Visitors meet the heat shield up close, can examine a Gemini 10 hatch, and walk past sounding rockets similar to those launched at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility 90 miles up the coast. The Apollo Lunar Excursion Module Simulator (LEMS) - which Langley astronauts actually used to practice lunar landings - hangs suspended from a gantry above the gallery, a working artifact of how engineers taught themselves to land somewhere they had never been.

Walk into the Adventures in Flight gallery and a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 dominates the room. Donated by AirTran Airways - the airline whose 2012 departure devastated nearby Newport News/Williamsburg airport - the jet lets visitors sit in the cockpit, in first class, in coach. Computer monitors mounted in the first-class windows show the view from a Boeing 717 simulator that you can fly yourself. Look up. Suspended from the roof are aircraft tied to research done at Langley, Langley Air Force Base, and area Navy installations: a Convair F-106 Delta Dart and McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II, a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and Republic F-84F Thunderstreak, a Bell P-39 Airacobra and the angled nose of a Grumman A-6 Intruder. The F-18 High Alpha Research Vehicle - HARV - was a NASA testbed for flight at extreme angles of attack.

The B-24D Liberator delivers something the Smithsonian's cordoned heavy bombers cannot: an onboard film that gives visitors the sensation of riding along with the pilots. Around it cluster homebuilts and trainers and oddities - a Rutan VariEze, a Pitts Special, a Schleicher ASW 12 glider, a Stearman N2S-3, a Piper J-3 Cub, a Hawker Siddeley Kestrel XV-6A from the lineage that produced the Harrier. A 1903 Wright Flyer replica grounds the entire display in the original problem: can a heavier-than-air machine be made to fly, and then made to land? Volunteers running the amateur radio exhibit periodically connect visitors to astronauts aboard the International Space Station through the Space Amateur Radio Experiment, closing the loop between the Wrights, the F-22 Raptor cockpit replica two galleries away, and people who happen to be orbiting overhead.

Above the second floor of the Space Quest exhibit, four planets hang approximately 22 feet in the air. Jupiter weighs over 750 pounds, measures ten feet across, and is the centerpiece of the largest planetary model display inside any museum in the country. Saturn is eight and a half feet in diameter and weighs 450 pounds with another 495 pounds of rings. Uranus and Neptune, each around 65 pounds, float beside them. At visitor level the inner planets appear at scale: Earth about the size of a soccer ball, Mercury about the size of a baseball. The Riverside IMAX 3D Theater holds another quiet superlative - of 447 IMAX theaters worldwide in operation when the conversion was made, it was the first institutional theater anywhere to run IMAX Digital.