I got a behind-the-scenes hard hat tour of three of the five new galleries that will open on July 1, 2026, at the Smithsonian National Air and Space altitude and be slowed from much greater speed. And SpaceX has made those launches and returns a routine thing, with some boosters having flown over 30 times. (NASM has a multiple-flight Merlin engine and a grid fin from a Falcon 9 in the Futures in Space gallery.)
Living in the Space Age also includes the Structural Dynamic Test vehicle of the Hubble Space Telescope, which was there before, and the WWII Nazi German V-2 rocket that both the US and the USSR studied as the basis for launching their space programs. There’s a fascinating display on the development of the human-shaped spacecraft we call spacesuits. Our cultural fascination with space is represented by the large lit star that welcomed visitors to the Coney Island “Astroland” amusement park. A model GPS satellite helps illustrate how thorough space has been integrated into our daily lives, with all of us constantly located by our phones and smart watches equipped with GPS.
And everywhere in the gallery are the stories of people we’ve never seen who made it possible for the exploits of astronauts, space probes, and telescopes to dazzle us – the engineers, designers, crafters, physicians, technicians, and specialists in many fields who turned dreams into reality. I suspect meeting them may ignite the imaginations of kids and inspire new career choices.
How Things Fly will remind visitors of the old interactive gallery by the same name, but boy, is it ever an upgrade! This will be the favorite place of many visitors, with its hands-on approach to experimenting as a way of learning. It’s much bigger than the old gallery was, with two floors instead of one, and for the first time, it includes spaceflight as well as atmospheric flight; the whole east half of the gallery deals with space, while the west half is dedicated to flight in air. There’s a wind chamber people can walk into to experience how different wing forms – worn on their arms like sleeves – produce lift and drag. And for the first time in any museum, there’s going to be an actual supersonic wind tunnel visitors can activate to observe the shock waves that form as a craft flying faster than the speed of sound starts to compress the air ahead of it. That hadn’t yet been installed when I visited, and the museum staff have their fingers crossed that the sound dampening for that tunnel will work as well as promised, because the shrieking airspeed inside will hit over 700 mph!
I lost count of how many interactive elements there are in that gallery, but they include rockets you can launch to explore the relationship between mass and thrust, a quadcopter in a glass box you can try to control in flight, a model airplane with interchangeable parts you can try to balance as you change pieces, a balloon you can try to launch by heating the air inside it, and an actual Cessna 172 Skyhawk mounted with an aluminum bench seat for easy access that visitors can get inside. The AAR Design Hangar will let visitors experiment with designing and building prototypes to test possible solutions to design challenges. It’s going to be an irresistible place to play.
There will always be museum staff and educators inside this gallery to assist visitors and monitor the use of interactives. I don’t envy them that mission!
Unlike the old gallery, this one also includes museum artifacts that illustrate principles, so you won’t need to remember what to look for elsewhere in the museum to link to what you were learning here. They include engines; historic wind tunnel models; a full-scale model of the first craft to orbit Mars, Mariner 9; and a real WAC Corporal sounding rocket.
Finally, as in all the other galleries in our new museum, this one features the stories of individual people who contributed to designing and building airplanes and spacecraft, including engineers, physicists, and mathematicians. It’s a place where you can imagine yourself being part of the dream of flight.
Discovering Our Universe is the new astronomy gallery, and it’s a total departure from the chronological approach the old gallery took. If you remember that one – which I loved! – it began with the millennia of human development where humans had only their Mark One eyeballs to study the skies and start figuring out stars, planets, and the structure of the solar system, and then followed the progress made possible through successive inventions, from the optical telescope to the application of spectroscopy, to radio telescopes, space-based telescopes, and much more.
That history of the evolution of new tools broadening and changing our understanding of the universe is still there, but it’s not forced linear progression. You’ll walk into a gallery with a spiral of stars over your head, and the whole gallery itself has the feel of being a spiral galaxy with arms you want to explore. Where the previous gallery was closed in, with you walking a mostly chronological path until you got close to contemporary time, the new gallery feels more open and lets you go to whatever interests you. Looking up, you’ll see large circular screens defining different areas, and those areas can be used by educators to focus attention on topics. The artifacts in the gallery – many of which still need to be mounted! – include things from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) that detected the first gravitational wave from colliding black holes, the Event Horizon Telescope that captured the first photo of a black hole, and the DTM Spectrograph that provided Vera Rubin with evidence that dark matter exists. How we find exoplanets, how we determine distance in space, how we know how far back in time we’re looking – they’re all on display. You may not be able to do the math yourself, but you’ll learn about the people who did, and how they figured things out.
My favorite art piece from the earlier gallery – the bronze sculptural panel letting you both see and feel a depiction of the big bang and the early expansion of the universe – will be mounted in the new gallery, but it was still wrapped up, leaning against a case, when I visited. And that’s far from the only tactile display; throughout the gallery there are tactiles to translate what we’re used to thinking of as purely visual perception into something accessible by people with low or no vision. There’s going to be an audio navigation system for the gallery offering an overview, spotlighting artifacts, and providing directions for interactive elements; that’s still being developed.
And that’s where my preview tour ended. I did learn that Flight and the Arts will be a two-level gallery, with part given over to a dedicated one- year visiting exhibition and another section featuring part of the museum’s permanent collection. (Did you realize that NASM has the largest collection of aerospace-related art in the world?) The art gallery always did change more frequently than other galleries in the museum. And pro tip: if you’re looking for a quiet retreat, the art gallery has always been your best bet!
The last two galleries in the museum will open this fall. At Home In Space will open October 30, 2026, and feature the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle we needed to build it. I really can’t wait for that one, because humans living in space are my jam, and I’ve been teased with the news that the gallery will include an immersive, walk-through recreation of the ISS Destiny Module, the US National Laboratory in Space. Whee! It also looks toward future space stations and bases on other worlds. The final gallery, Modern Military Aviation, will open on Veteran’s Day, November 11, 2026, and that willcomplete the original museum footprint.
Construction is beginning on the Bezos Learning Center, immediately to the east of the museum, where the museum restaurant used to be. I’m told the Center will eventually include a restaurant for the museum, because our little Mars Cafe on the lower level really can’t accommodate the crowds of visitors we get, but I haven’t seen a timeline for it yet.
By the way – expect that free timed tickets will remain a requirement, although the number of tickets released each day is increasing as the accessible space within the museum grows with each new opening. Trust me, it’s a good idea: I remember all too well how jammed the museum got, especially in summer, when you couldn’t get close enough to exhibits to read signs! And I remember times we had to block access to the second floor, because the crowds were so big that we approached exceeding the weight the second floor could hold!
Make your plans for this summer and fall. See you at the museum!