Aerospace Education Center - Little Rock, Arkansas - Museum, Theater and Planetarium

The Aerospace Education Center is located at E. Roosevelt Drive in Little Rock, Arkansas and is approximately seven and a half miles from Little Rock Regional Airport. The center consists of a museum, giant screen theatre and an episphere planetarium. It opened in 1995 with a view to providing vital educational tools for students and teachers through interesting exhibits, workshops and summer programs.

The museum has various exhibits including replicas of historic planes and space craft, which visitors can touch and read plenty of information about the evolution of flight. There is also a library with over 35,000 aerospace related books and is home to the Jay Miller Collection. This is one of the most complete collections of aviation information and memorabilia outside the Smithsonian Institution.

Miller collected around 6,000 books on military aviation, civil aviation, commercial aviation, the aerospace industry in general, hang gliding, lighter-than-air craft, paper airplanes, model airplanes, home-built aircraft, space vehicles, space exploration politics, space foreign policy, aviation art, autobiography, biography, aviation and aerospace instruction, aviation history, and aviation and aerospace fiction. These were gathered over a 40 year period and include at least 300 books in foreign languages, and he also collected some 50,000 journals and magazines as well as 350,000 photographs. Miller sold his collection to the Aerospace Education Center in 1995.

Visitors are also treated to video shows in the Giantscreen Theater including one about fighting some of the world's fiercest wild fires. This focuses on the brave men and women in the U.S and Australia who battle against these fires, including smokejumpers that parachute into blazes and water-bombing helicopters. Showtimes run three or four times daily from Tuesday to Saturday each week.

Another film perhaps more suited to younger children is a humorous look at wildlife with singing lions and waltzing bears. Again this runs from Tuesday to Saturday with Friday night a favorite for families as entry to the museum free. There is also a film about the Egyptian pharaohs, which provides an insight into the culture, religion, medicine and daily lives of people from thousands of years ago.

The EpiSphere is a 150-seater state of the art digital dome theater and planetarium that opened in 2004 and provides exciting astronomical presentations. Special educational programs are offered to students here as well, which teaches them to build and launch rockets, high-altitude weather balloons and robots. These programs run on Saturdays are taught by nationally board certified teachers as well as guest instructors including aviators, engineers, programmers and technicians in the aerospace/aviation industry.

The center can be hired for weddings, meetings, conferences and other special events with tables, podium, microphones, ice and projectors available to use if required. The lobby are can be used for receptions, while the McDermott Room has 1,750 square feet of space and the Observation Gallery has even more room at 1,900 square feet. If companies want to make presentations or perhaps preview their latest advertising campaign, they can also hire the IMAX Theater, which has 254 seats or the Planetarium with 140 seats.