"At Home in Space" opens, caps Air and Space Museum renovation

"At Home in Space" displays artifacts from the space shuttle-era, as we learned how to go from visiting to living on orbit. 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.