I'd add the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, and the Air and Space Museum (both sites). They are not as up-close-and-personal as some of the ones mentioned in the article, owing to the extreme number of visitors, but have some utterly unique and historic artifacts, like Thomas Edison's lab.
The Henry Ford has tons of cool stuff. A running Apple 1. The working Wright Experience replica of the Wright Flyer that was flown at Kitty Hawk for the 100th anniversary. So much amazing
They have not only the actual Wright Brothers Cycle Shop building and their house from 7 Hawthorn St. Dayton (Ford moved the buildings), but Ford hired their mechanic Charlie Taylor to set everything up as it was in Dayton. Taylor re-acquired the original tools; not the same kind, the exact serial numbers. When you walk outside, there's even a Dayton manhole cover on the ground.
The US Smithsonian National Air and Space (NASM) museums are great.
For those that aren’t aware, one of the locations is on the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC and the other - the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center - is near the Dulles Airport in Dulles, VA.
The latter has the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, a Concorde… and the Enola Gay.
The Udvar Hazy is being expanded to hold more stuff.
The downtown location has more interpretation of artifacts - sometimes at the Udvar Hazy it's hard to really appreciate what you're looking at without a docent-led tour or other context.
It also doesn't hurt that the docents include people like an SR-71 pilot.
The Udvar-Hazy Center is utterly amazing. It’s like someone said “hey, you like planes? Here’s all of them. And they’re just there, you can walk up close to them. I took my family for the first time this summer, when we heard they were going to lose the Space Shuttle, and we all loved it.
