Smithsonian Air And Space Opens Halls For “Milestone” And “Future” Artifacts

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The National Air and Space Museum welcomed the public into five more of its renovated galleries on Monday, including two showcasing spaceflight artifacts. The new exhibitions shine modern light on returning displays and restore the museum's almost 50-year-old legacy of adding objects that made history but have yet to become historical.

Visitors can again enter through the "Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall," which has been closed for the past three years and has on display some of the museum's most iconic items, including John Glenn's Friendship 7 Mercury capsule and an Apollo lunar module.

From there, visitors can tour through the adjacent "Futures in Space," a new gallery focused on the different approaches and technology that spaceflight will take in the years to come.

Here, the Smithsonian is displaying for the first time objects that were recently donated by commercial spaceflight companies, including items used in space tourism and in growing the low-Earth orbit economy.

"We are thrilled to open this next phase of exhibitions to the public," said Chris Browne, the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the National Air and Space Museum, in a statement.

"Reopening our main hall with so many iconic aerospace artifacts, as well as completely new exhibitions, will give visitors much more to see and enjoy."

The other three galleries newly open to the public are devoted to aviation history, including the "Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight," "World War I: The Birth of Military Aviation," and the "Allan and Shelley Holt Innovations Gallery."

Among the artifacts debuting in "Futures in Space" are a Merlin engine and grid fin that flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Sian Proctor's pressure suit that she wore on the private Inspiration4 mission in 2021, and a mockup of a New Shepard crew module that Blue Origin has pledged to replace with its first flown capsule when it is retired from flying.

"When the museum first opened back in 1976 and people came here and saw things like the Apollo command module and Neil Armstrong's spacesuit, or really anything related to human spaceflight, at that point it was all still very recent," said Matt Shindell, one of the curators behind "Futures in Space," in an interview with collectSPACE.com. "So when you would come into the museum, it wasn't so much a history of space but what's happening now and what could happen next.

We wanted to have a gallery that would recapture that feeling."