NASA Ames Exploration Center, Space research museum in Silicon Valley, United States.

NASA Ames Exploration Center is a museum at a research facility in California that displays actual spacecraft and components from previous missions. The facility also shows interactive displays explaining how spacecraft work and how testing for aircraft and space systems takes place.

Ames Research Center was founded in 1939 as the second laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and was named after physicist Joseph Sweetman Ames, a founding NACA member. On 1 October 1958 its assets and staff passed to the newly created NASA. Its wind tunnels tested Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules and space shuttle models, and it managed the eight Pioneer missions between 1965 and 1978.

The center displays how space exploration shapes modern life through objects and exhibits that show how people understand and engage with space missions. Visitors see here how these endeavors influenced the everyday technology that people use today.

Plan your visit during weekday and weekend opening hours when all exhibit areas are accessible. Visitors should allow enough time to try the interactive displays and view the displayed objects.

The wind tunnels stand in the research center behind the visitor center, not in the exhibit hall. The National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex holds the world's largest wind tunnel test section, 80 by 120 feet, wide enough for a full Boeing 737; the smaller 40-by-80-foot leg reaches 300 knots. Every major U.S. commercial airliner and nearly all military jets were tested there.