// ARS TECHNICA — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
"At Home in Space" opens, caps Air and Space Museum renovation
The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has all of its “space” back open.
After seven years of work and nearly $1 billion, the Smithsonian has completed the renovation of the National Air and Space Museum’s flagship building in Washington, DC.
On October 30, the museum debuted its last-to-open spaceflight exhibition, returning “home” with a gallery devoted to establishing a spacefaring civilization.
“Welcome to ‘At Home in Space’!” said curator Jennifer Levasseur, who guided us through a virtual tour of the gallery. “This is the story of long-duration spaceflight in the last few decades. We generally call it ‘reaching orbit.’”
“It’s the prep story, the space shuttle story. It’s what allows us to end up at a place where we have 25-plus years of long-duration spaceflight experience, the capacity for humans to be living in space on the International Space Station (ISS), and then it carries that story forward. So the middle of our story then becomes the ISS, and the end of the story are the next steps,” said Levasseur.
Over the past several years, the National Air and Space Museum has introduced new galleries showcasing how US astronauts first entered space and landed on the Moon (“Destination Moon”); how robotic probes have explored every planet in our solar system (“Kenneth C. Griffin Exploring the Planets”); how technologies and infrastructure impact our daily lives (“RTX Living in the Space Age Hall”) and what approaches spaceflight will take in the years to come (“Futures in Space”).
“At Home in Space,” which follows the similarly themed “Moving Beyond Earth,” immerses guests in the equipment, spacecraft, and orbital platforms that have enabled humanity from simply visiting space to living there, setting up the near future for bases on the Moon and Mars.
“We have a great way to attract people into the gallery, which is this overhead mock-up of an astronaut on the end of the robotic arm, and then the backdrop to that is this photo mural—a full-size photo print—of the ISS,” said Levasseur. “Our astronaut up here is intended to be [an actual] person, but I’m not going to share who that is. They are wearing an Expedition 60 patch, so that’ll give you a little clue.”
Some of the gallery’s artifacts include a space shuttle main engine, Robonaut 1A (a prototype humanoid robot), and an extravehicular mobility unit (EMU) spacesuit.
“It’s pretty damn special,” said Levasseur of the EMU. “This, as far as I know, is the first and potentially only public display of a fully flown set of EMU equipment in the world. I know NASA has one in its EVA office, but it is not on public display.”