Holiday Washington DC in Nov 2025: Day 8 – The Air and Space Museum at Dulles

By Nige on November 16, 2025 at 3:10 pm
Type: Post
Story: Holiday Washington DC in Nov 2025 Category: Travel
Tags: Hertz | Hilton | Holidays | USA | Washington DC

The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, also known as the Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport, forms part of the Smithsonian Institute, which is the world’s largest museum, education and research complex.

It comprises two large hangars filled with over 3,000 history-making objects, including over 200 aircraft and spacecraft.

These hangars are joined together to form one very large museum of an amazing collection of aircraft, including the Lockheed Blackbird, an Air France Concorde and the Space Shuttle Discovery.

Entry is free, but parking costs $15.

We started off with a visit to the IMAX Theatre to watch 2015’s Journey to Space, narrated by Patrick Stewart, which was a great way to generate some excitement.

We were lucky to sneak into the 10:20 showing and it was just about worth the $19 fee for the two of us.

There were about four films showing during the day, all different. Journey to Space was the best choice for us.

All visitors naturally enter the Boeing Aviation Hangar first.

There are detailed maps all around the museum to help give a sense of the scale of the museum and explain how the artefacts are grouped by category.

Although some of the aircraft did not appear to be located where they were supposed to be!

We were immediately hit by the impressive star of this hangar: the Lockheed Blackbird.

It looked scary, although it was built for strategic reconnaissance, rather than bombing.

It was capable of flying at over Mach 3, or more than 2,200 mph, and could operate at altitudes above 85,000 feet.

One of the aircraft more recently enshrined in the museum was the Kingsley Field F-15C Eagle A/C 114, which was an impressive looking beast.

The F-15C had a remarkable career, spanning more than four decades, from the Cold War’s tense standoffs to the deserts of Iraq and finally to the training fields of Oregon.

There are raised walkways at the museum which allow visitors to get even better views of some of the artefacts on display.

The Air France Concorde is located at the far left in the Boeing Aviation Hangar.

From the ground floor, we walked up to the raised walkway and walked through to the James S Mcdonnell Space Hangar.

The James S Mcdonnell Space Hangar is the smaller hangar of the two, but contains a real-life Space Shuttle!

To be honest there isn’t a great deal else in this hangar, but Discovery is enough to warrant a visit.

Space Shuttle Discovery was the third Space Shuttle to fly, serving from 1984 to 2011 and completing 39 missions.

It’s an impressive sight.

Discovery spent 365 days in space and travelled nearly 150 million miles.

Its missions included deploying and servicing satellites, building the International Space Station, and carrying the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit.

Is that all?

We spent about an hour or so wandering around the artefacts and found the whole thing amazing.

We ended up in the Shake Shack, which provides the only catering option in the museum.

We over-ordered as normal, but the burgers were pretty impressive, if a little on the expensive side.

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Holiday Washington DC in Nov 2025