At Home in Space Opens to Complete National Air and Space Museum Overhaul

After seven years of work and nearly $1 billion, the Smithsonian has finished renovating its flagship museum building in Washington. The final spaceflight gallery, titled At Home in Space, opened on October 30 to mark the completion of the massive project. Curator Jennifer Levasseur guided visitors through the new exhibition, which focuses on long-duration spaceflight and humanity’s push to live off-Earth continuously.

The gallery bridges the gap between early shuttle missions and current operations on the International Space Station, while setting up future lunar and Martian exploration. Visitors encounter rare artifacts immediately, including an overhead mockup of an astronaut on a robotic arm against an ISS photo mural. The exhibit houses a fully flown extravehicular mobility unit spacesuit, which stands out as the only one on public display outside of NASA's own offices.

Other displays feature historical flight clothes worn by Sally Ride and Guion Bluford, alongside recovered debris pieces from the Challenger and Columbia tragedies. Our read is that displaying fragments of fallen orbiters alongside modern DNA sequencers and space coffee cups grounds our grandest space ambitions in actual human cost and gritty operational reality.

Moving forward, the gallery leaves physical space waiting for the arrival of the actual Artemis I capsule, turning a historical museum into a living archive of an ongoing return to the Moon.