The rockets get the glory, but the hardest problem in spaceflight is breakfast. “At Home in Space,” the newest gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., is built around that truth: how human beings learned to eat, sleep, work, wash and stay sane while living for months inside metal tubes orbiting the Earth. The gallery opened to the public on Friday, October 30, completing the museum’s seven-year transformation of all 20 of its galleries. In the video above, Space.com editor-in-chief Tariq Malik tours the exhibition ahead of opening with curator Jennifer Levasseur. It is a show about spaceflight with almost no launches in it — and it may be the most human gallery the museum has ever mounted.
The timing is deliberate. Humanity has now kept a continuous presence in orbit for more than a quarter of a century aboard the International Space Station, and NASA’s Artemis programme is preparing to send crews back to the Moon for stays far longer than the Apollo landings. The museum’s renovation, which began in 2018, set out to reimagine every gallery for that new era rather than simply polish the old one. “At Home in Space” is the final major piece of that project, alongside the “Modern Military Aviation” gallery opening on November 11. Together they close out a rebuild that also replaced the building’s exterior cladding and mechanical systems, just as the museum marks its 50th anniversary year.
Stepping Inside the Destiny Laboratory
The centrepiece of the gallery is a full-scale, walk-through mock-up of the Destiny module, the United States laboratory aboard the International Space Station and the station’s primary American research facility. Visitors step inside the cylinder and stand where astronauts float to run experiments, surrounded by racks of equipment and displays of the tools of orbital science. The real Destiny has been in orbit since 2001, and research performed inside it has produced results impossible on Earth — including protein crystals grown in microgravity that help scientists design new medicines. Interactive elements line one side of the mock-up, with crew equipment and everyday artifacts displayed within reach. It is the closest most visitors will ever come to being inside the station, and the gallery uses it as the front door to everything else.
Around Destiny, the exhibition traces more than 50 years of learning to live beyond Earth, from the cramped capsules and early space stations to the permanently crewed outpost flying today. The story is told less through spacecraft than through the small solved problems that made long missions possible. How do you shower when water floats? How do you cook, exercise, repair a toilet, or celebrate a birthday at 17,500 miles per hour? Each answer on display is an artifact somebody actually used, which gives the gallery a texture no replica can match.
Real Gear From Real Missions
The artifact list is the strongest argument for the trip to Washington. A flown Extravehicular Mobility Unit spacesuit — the white backpack suit used for spacewalks — is on display, described as the only fully flown spacesuit of its kind on public view. A massive space shuttle main engine anchors the gallery’s hardware, its bell large enough to stand inside. Beside the big machines sit the in-flight suits worn by Guion “Guy” Bluford, the first African American in space, and Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. Robonaut 1A, NASA’s experimental humanoid robot, represents the machines built to share the work of living in orbit.
Just as revealing are the small objects. The first 3D printer sent to the space station is here — a machine that proved spare parts could be manufactured in orbit rather than launched from Earth. Tools used to sequence DNA in space for the first time, the miniPCR and MinION devices, show how station science moved from carrying samples home to analysing them on the spot. Astronaut food, personal items flown by crew members, a space toilet and coffee cups engineered to hold a drink together in microgravity fill out the picture of daily life. The tour even answers the question visitors always ask and docents rarely can: what space smells like, a scent astronauts describe as something between burnt metal and seared steak, carried back inside the airlock on their suits.
Lessons Orbit Is Teaching the Moon and Mars
The gallery’s second purpose is forward-looking. Every system on display — recycling water, growing food research, printing parts, monitoring crew health down to their DNA — is a prototype for the problems Artemis crews will face on the Moon, where resupply takes days, and for Mars missions, where it becomes impossible. The exhibition makes that link explicit in its final section, which is reserved for Artemis. A quarter-scale model of the Orion spacecraft currently holds a place of honour there. It is a placeholder: the museum expects to replace it with the real Artemis I capsule, the uncrewed Orion that flew around the Moon in 2022, once NASA delivers the artifact later this year.
That arrangement captures the gallery’s unusual position between history and news. Most museum exhibitions open when their story ends; this one opens while its story is still being written, by crews currently living aboard the station it celebrates. The multiplayer Spaceflight Academy Quiz, which lets visitors compete on what they have learned about travelling in space, underlines the point that the audience itself is part of the pipeline — some of the schoolchildren playing it will apply for astronaut classes shaped by Artemis. Curators designed the gallery to be updated as flown artifacts return from orbit, rather than frozen at its opening. In that sense “At Home in Space” is less a monument than a subscription, renewed every time a crew comes home with something worth keeping.
Practical details are simple. Admission to the National Air and Space Museum remains free, although timed-entry passes are required for the building on the National Mall, and the new gallery is expected to be one of the renovation’s biggest draws. Visitors who come for the rockets and warplanes of the museum’s earlier era will find those galleries transformed as well, eight years after the project began. But the new gallery makes a different case: that the defining achievement of the space age is not that humans visited space, but that they learned to live there. After a quarter-century of continuous occupation in orbit, “At Home in Space” finally gives that achievement a home on Earth.
