Museum of Technology

Location
The Museum of Technology is located in Washington D.C. in Fallout 3. The building is crumbling, with pillars falling out of place and visible holes in the roof, and the attractions have been heavily damaged.

When approaching the museum, be prepared for a fierce battle that is not for the faint of heart, as the immediate area is crawling with super mutants, super mutant brutes, and possibly super mutant masters, depending on the difficulty setting and the player's level.

The preferable approach is via the Museum Metro station just across the street. When you come up the stairs from the station, it is easy to pick off Mutants with a sniper rifle and then just walk across to the Museum.

Unmarked quest: Jiggs' Loot
In the atrium, there is a lit "Museum Information" terminal with a message from Prime to Jiggs, beginning the minor quest about a weapons cache in the Security Office Safe. Additionally, there are three other "Museum Information" terminals where codes need to be properly entered to obtain a password for terminal near the safe. Inside the safe is the key to the gun cabinet in the planetarium. That gun case contains a missile launcher, some missiles, and 2 pulse grenades. See the main quest article for a more in-depth discussion.

Notable Loot

 * A skill book Nikola Tesla and You can be found on the 2nd floor of the atrium, in the turret control room on the right of the Maintenance computer.
 * There are three Stealth Boy 3001's on display in the museum, complete with little plaques describing them: one in the main entrance of the atrium, and two more up the main stairs to the left in the entry room leading to the 'Halls of Today' exhibit.
 * There are two hidden areas under the multi-level staircase surrounding the Delta IX rocket. Starting from the lower floor, go up the stairs and along the walkway to plaques that say 'Activate Delta IX Rocket'. Just to the left of each plaque is a gap between the room railing and the stairway railing. At each gap (or better, at each plaque), instead of going up the stairs, jump up onto the room railing, then down onto the little ledge that runs along the outside of the stairs. Follow the ledge to each hidden area.
 * The first area has a Bed, an Ammunition Box, a Mine Box, a Stimpak, one Jet, and an Assault Rifle.
 * The second area is actually a blocked off room, which contains another Bed, the skill book Guns and Bullets, 4 Purified Waters, 2 Nuka Cola bottles, another Stimpak and three or four minor goods. If you have a companion, he or she may warp into the room after you get there, and warp back out when you leave.


 * In the planetarium office, there is a Nuka-Cola Quantum on the shelf.
 * On the first floor, in the men's bathroom, the first stall is booby trapped. There are wires running from the back of the toilet into the bowl.  If you drink from the toilet you will be electrocuted.  If you hop onto the toilet and look into the upper back, you can disarm the trap and acquire some microfusion cells that were being used to power it.

Trivia

 * The museum occupies the real-life site of the National Air and Space Museum.


 * The original plane successfully flown by the Wright Brothers (the Wright 'Flyer') is the plane that is on the floor, smashed, as you walk in the main entrance.


 * On a semicircular desk in the atrium, a number of pencils and one bottlecap are arranged to form the logo of the gaming news website Shacknews.


 * Deeper inside the museum, you can find two more airplanes. Hanging from the ceiling in the same room as the Virgo II is a P-51 Mustang, which can be shot down to make it fall to the floor. This airplane is also on display in the Capitol Preservation Society. In the West Wing partially buried in the rubble is a P-80 Shooting Star fighter (the same as the planes resting on the deck of the Rivet City aircraft carrier).


 * There is a Vault-Tec Vault Tour on the second floor which you must go through in order to get to the Virgo II lander. It displays the various technology used by Vault-Tec in constructing the Vaults. The number on the presentation Vault's door is "106".


 * A flag on the lobby balcony references a destroyed ship named Ebon Atoll, which is likely a reference to Black Isle. They note it was "torpedoed" (lit. sabotaged) by a friendly.


 * There is a reference to L.A. death/industrial metal band Fear Factory. There are two separate computer terminals, one in the lobby and one in the planetarium, where you can access the research lead's notes. The first journal entry contains lyrics from Fear Factory's song Archetype:

"'The virus that has been plaguing our Archetype Model FF06 Mainframe due to an unknown attack has finally been localized by our research team and identified. After a complete cleanup on the mainframe's core, I am happy to announce that the infection has been removed...the soul of this machine has improved. B. Bell, Research Lead'"
 * Burton Bell is the name of Fear Factory's lead singer.


 * Two exhibits on the ground floor near the Delta Rocket celebrate the first human space flight of Carl Bell as taking place on May 5, 1961 in the space capsule Defiance 7. That date is the flight of the first American in space, Alan Shepherd, aboard the Freedom 7 capsule. Note that Shepherd did not orbit the earth and that his flight lasted fifteen minutes.


 * The Virgo II moon lander on display illustrates the gradual divergence of the Fallout universe with the real one.
 * The moon lander module (from which we take the antenna dish for the GNR quest) that we see in the game is called "Virgo II", while in the real world, it was called the "Lunar Module Eagle". Also, the design of the lander in the museum is not that of the NASA LEM (Lunar Excursion Module), but that of the Soviet LK or Lunniy Korabl (Lunar Lander) as seen here.
 * The names of the astronauts who made the first landing are different than those of the real world.
 * In one of the exhibits around the rocket, we can see the US flag that was supposedly recovered from the site of the original moon landing by the crew of the last mission to go there. The flag is not the Star Spangled Banner, but rather the "Commonwealth flag", as the US broke up into 13 commonwealths before the Great War and the flag was changed.