Ready for lift off

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on January 27, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

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by Lawrence Toppman

Soon after I entered Air Force ROTC in college, a bunch of us were chatting about why we joined. One future second lieutenant planned a military career and preferred to begin as an officer. Another wanted to be assured he’d complete college during the Vietnam War. A third needed the free tuition, books and $100 monthly stipend. But the philosopher among us said, “I just want to get off the ground, y’know? I’m tired of being stuck on the Earth.”

I thought of him as I wandered around “Above and Beyond,” which flies high at Discovery Place through April 19. It encompasses celestial objects of all kinds, from birds to the International Space Station, and it could ignite a desire to take to the sky in any viewer.

Unlike many exhibits at the science museum, “Above and Beyond” doesn’t have a clearly defined entry or exit point or suggest a path to follow. You wander around one large room of this highly interactive exhibit, doing everything from emulating a bird in flight to snatching space junk out of the sky before it crashes into something valuable.

You realize quickly that every engineer in aeronautic or aerospace research and design has the same goals: To make vehicles lighter, stronger, faster, able to go farther and be smarter in the ways they process and communicate data. (If you’re designing satellites, of course, you want them to be smaller and perhaps able to fly in swarms.)

Much of the exhibit seems to enter the realm of fantasy. Planes that move at Mach 5, more than one mile per second? Aircraft that need not follow the path of air traffic control towers but can fly straight from point to point? A mega-rocket Space Launch System that carries crews to Mars, roughly a six-month journey, or further away? “Beamed energy propulsion” that uses lasers or microwaves, not heavier chemical rockets, to launch light spacecraft? All are on drawing boards right now.

It’s possible to drown in facts, if you give full attention to every placard, but certain ones dazzled me. The average passenger jet cruises at seven miles above sea level, more than a mile above Mount Everest. Though eight million people fly every day around the world, that number could nearly double by 2040. (No wonder we need smarter planes and ground equipment.) The International Space Station can be programmed to avoid debris more than four inches wide but must put up Whipple shields made of thin layers of aluminum to block anything smaller.

Yet “Above and Beyond” focuses equally on facts and fun. Kids around me waved their arms gleefully in “Spread Your Wings,” a simulation program where they had to flap, glide, dive, swoop left and swoop right while following the leading bird in a V formation. In “Full Throttle,” they chose wing shape, fuselage design and tail configuration for a supersonic jet, then “flew” their prototype through a computerized obstacle course for 90 seconds. (Hint: You can’t have both top speed and top maneuverability, a good lesson for life.)

Other sections let them pilot a drone in the eye of a hurricane, decide whether to vaporize or recycle some of the millions of pieces of trash floating far above us, and ride a virtual “elevator” from the planet’s surface to a point 33,000 miles up. There the “International Space Port,” presented as if it were already a reality, was sending humans to infinity and beyond, as Buzz Lightyear would say.

All good science exhibits remind us to stretch our imaginations and dream of things that now seem impossible, but this one does so especially well. I’ve experienced six kinds of flight: propeller planes, jets, hang gliders, hot air balloons, helicopters and a leap off the top of a shed that ended with a crash landing in my back yard. “Above and Beyond” made me wish I were 50 years younger, so I might round out my airborne life someday with rocket travel.

“Above and Beyond” is produced by Evergreen Exhibitions in association with Boeing and in collaboration with NASA and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. It runs at Discovery Place, 168 W. Sixth St., through April 19.

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Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.

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