Planning to visit the DC Mall this summer for any of the sesquicentennial activities? Take a few minutes to get your space fix at the new display in the West Lobby of NASA Headquarters, just off 4th and E Streets, SW (Hidden Figures Way). It’s open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday. NASA is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States by featuring some of our aerospace accomplishments in a new public display. It wasn’t quite finished when I visited on Friday, 5 June 2026, but it should be fully open now.
The star of the display is a full-scale model of the Perseverance Mars rover, which landed (together with the Ingenuity helicopter!) on 18 February 2021, after launching on 30 July 2020. You get to walk all the way around the six-wheeled rover, roughly the size of an SUV, and admire its extended drill arm. Perseverance is making discoveries every day in the Jezero Crater on Mars.
Above the rover is the impressive silver ACS3, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. Launched into low Earth orbit as a small CubeSat on 23 April 2024, ACS3 successfully extended its long composite booms to unfurl its large, four-panel square sail to use the pressure of sunlight to propel the satellite through space. While this technology demonstration is taking place in low Earth orbit, the intent is to apply it to use for deep space exploration, using the solar wind in place of chemical propellants to accelerate probes to their targets. If you’re curious about it, check out the mission at https://www.nasa.gov/mission/acs3/, and learn how to #SpotTheSail in orbit! The lobby display uses flight spares of the long, lightweight composite booms used on the satellite in orbit.
The display also includes a replica of an Apollo A7L space suit, like the ones worn by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on Apollo 11; a small model of an RS-25 engine, the former Space Shuttle main engines now being expended to launch the SLS (Space Launch System) rockets sending Orion capsules into space on our Artemis missions to the Moon; a full fidelity fuel cell that was ready to fly on the Space Shuttle to combine hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity and water; and a small model of the Orion Launch Abort System (LAS), which would pull the Orion capsule and its astronauts off the SLS to safety if the rocket suffered a malfunction at launch or early in flight. A glass case contains assorted tools used during the Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions, and another case contains the AVATAR flight hardware that just flew on the Artemis II mission to carry organ chips made from the human astronauts’ cells to facilitate the study of the effects of deep space radiation and microgravity on human health.
The Moon Room portion of the display wasn’t yet open when I visited, but the technicians doing the installation said it would include asteroid and moon rock samples. The art already up on the walls featured photographs from our Apollo Moon landing missions, including our “Moon buggy” lunar rovers. But the best part of the Moon display was already accessible in the lobby itself: a touchable Moon rock, inset into a glowing half- sphere! Unlike the touchable Moon rock at the National Air and Space Museum, this one isn’t flush with the display surface, but extends a bit above it, so you can appreciate its dimensions and feel a bit of the sides as well as the top. Yes, of course I took a Moon-touch selfie!
The one aeronautical achievement in the display is a full-scale mock-up of NASA’s small X 43A/ Hyper-X experimental hypersonic scramjet research aircraft, which successfully flew on 16 November 2004, reaching a top cruise speed of Mach 9.6 – almost 7,000 mph! A scramjet is an air -breathing engine in which the airflow through the engine remains supersonic, and the X-43A was the first scramjet ever operated in flight. Mounted on a Pegasus booster rocket, the X-43A was launched from NASA’s B-52B and ignited its scramjet engine after separating from the booster. You can watch footage of that flight here: https://www.youtube.com/watch v=anw1x9Ngjl0.
It’s a small display, but a fun visit. The NASA gift shop is also located in the West Lobby, so if you’re looking for some NASA merchandise, it’s a good stop. You can even buy coffee and donuts in the lobby; that wasn’t there before.
The spectacular NASA Earth Information Center display I wrote up a couple of years ago is still active in the East Lobby of the NASA HQ building, at the entry near 3rd Street, SW. You need to enter each lobby separately; the lobbies themselves are open to the public without restriction, but transiting through the building between them would require clearance through building security.
