New NASM Galleries from Mary Dominiak

Last month, we cued you in to new galleries opening this summer at the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall: now we have actual dates! The Milestones of Flight gallery – with its brand new, gorgeous winged portico entrance on the Mall – will open July 28, 2025, along with Pioneers of Flight, World War I: The Birth of Military Aviation, Futures in Space, and Innovations: Aerospace and Our Changing Environment galleries, and the updated Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater.

Free timed entry tickets are available right now on the museum’s website (https://www.etix.com/ticket/e/1029945/timed-entry-washington-the-smithsonian -national-air-and-space-museum-general-public): make sure you get yours for the date you want to visit! With more of the museum open to absorb the crowds, about twice as many tickets will be available each hour as have been offered up to now. Here are some pro tips on ticketing:

• Don’t come early and stand in line! If you plan to arrive at the museum about 15 minutes after the time on your ticket, you will likely be able to walk right up to and through the entry door. The line to get tickets scanned on your way in moves fast once the doors open each hour, but it’s no fun standing in sweltering heat (or maybe pouring rain) while you wait for your turn through the door. Even a line running around the corner of the building is mostly inside within 15 or 20 minutes.
• You can go out and come back in once on your timed ticket. If you need to move your car (but why drive into town when the Metro is so convenient?) or get lunch outside the museum (yeah, the Mars Cafe inside is very small, pretty limited in menu, and museum-pricey; the food trucks on the street are a better deal), don’t worry; you can go out once and come back in using your ticket. When you come back, come straight to the entry doors; don’t join the line waiting for the next hourly admission. They’ll scan your ticket again and welcome you back in. But make certain you’ve finished eating and drinking before you return: only water is allowed inside the museum! There are water bottle fillers near the restrooms on each floor.
• There’s only one way in: you MUST use the Mall doors! Beginning on July 28, you WON’T be able to enter the museum through the Independence Avenue doors; all entry will be through the new portico doors on the Mall side, on Jefferson Drive, SW. When you reserve entry tickets from the new opening onward, you’ll see that notice. There hasn’t been any announcement explaining the single- entrance decision, but it makes sense especially from a cost perspective: duplicating screening machinery and ticket-scanning staff adds up fast, and budget cuts are having effects. Historically, more people always entered from the Mall than from Independence, and accommodating security screening is precisely why the new portico was added to the building design. I’m guessing that the line for entry will probably run from the doors toward 7th Street, since more foot traffic comes from the western side than from the Capitol Hill one. You’ll be able to exit using the Independence Avenue doors, which will provide convenient access to food trucks for lunch and to the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station for your tired ride home.
• Once you’re in, you can stay until the museum closes. It doesn’t matter if your ticket is for 10:00 AM or 2:00 PM: once you’re inside, the only limit on your stay is closing time for the museum. But be aware that the gift shops close when the museum does, so make sure you get your shopping done within time!
• Daytime IMAX and Planetarium tickets are ONLY available onsite! This makes sense if you think about it: since timed tickets are required for entry to the Mall museum, you can’t buy tickets to the shows until you’re inside the museum. I’m betting that you will be able to buy tickets online for the big Hollywood blockbusters that will run in IMAX after museum hours, the same way as you can for the Airbus IMAX theater at Udvar-Hazy, but I haven’t seen any show schedules for the downtown theater yet. The Northrop Grumman Planetarium box office is on the second floor, above the west side of the Milestones gallery; the Lockheed Martin IMAX box office is on the first floor, east of the round Welcome Center.
• Maps and docent tour information will be available at the Welcome Center in Milestones. Do stop at the round Welcome Center (near the nuclear missiles!) in the Milestones of Flight gallery to pick up maps. The Welcome Center is still being assembled, so I can’t provide details, but I believe there will be monitor displays with theater information and signs for any available highlight (walking around) or spotlight (docent in a gallery) tours. Tours in the brand new galleries will probably be a bit limited for a while, because docent training for all the new displays hasn’t been completed yet; we’re working on it, but there are lots of new stories we’ll be able to tell. Heck – Futures in Space includes things happening right now, like the development of commercial space travel and tourism, that never appeared in the museum before! Fun times

Once you’re inside and touring around, take three more pro tips to make your visit more immersive and enjoyable:

• Always, always, always remember to LOOK UP! Our artifacts fly, so if you’re not looking up – something we humans are notoriously bad at doing! – you will literally miss half the museum. If I had a dime for all the times I’ve casually asked visitors in Destination Moon near Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit if they’ve looked above them, only to see them doing a flabbergasted double-take when they realize they’ve been standing under 18,000 pounds of rocket engine (an actual F1 engine from a Saturn V rocket!), I could afford dinner at an upscale DC restaurant. Poe Dameron’s X-Wing fighter from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is hanging right above the west side escalators to the second floor; I’ve seen people who rode that escalator up totally
  miss it until they’re walking back to the escalator to head back downstairs!

• Don’t miss looking at the floor, either! The new museum design makes the floors in the common areas and the galleries integral parts of the display. The commons hallways include inspiring, sometimes funny quotations from aerospace luminaries. The floor in the Milestones of Flight gallery, extending into the South Lobby, displays an updated version of the pulsar map carried into interstellar space by the Voyager probes, designating Earth as the origin point of those probes; look at the cover of the Voyager Golden Record in the Exploring the Planets gallery to see the original. The floor in the One World Connected gallery provides a graphical depiction of orbital distances for satellites. Just outside the new Pioneers of Flight gallery, the museum’s new compass rose (replacing the one that used to be outside the Time and Navigation gallery), celebrates the 99’s, the very first organization of women pilots. Every floor tells part of the overall story, and I find them magical.

Engage with interactives! Every gallery now has built-in interactive elements letting you drill down further into individual stories of people both famous and not; participate in opinion research; explore how various technologies work; see different depictions of satellite and other data to better understand their implications; and test your knowledge and comprehension. Play with our toys kids, definitely make a beeline for any large cart you see with someone standing behind it: they’re our Discovery carts staffed by student Explainers (plus some adult volunteers) who exist to share interactive learning with visitors on everything from gravity and black holes to spacesuit construction to meteorites to principles of flight and more. They set up in different areas of the museum, most often near the entrance to galleries or in open common areas, and welcome all comers. and touch our screens! And if you’re visiting with kids, definitely make a beeline for any large cart you see with someone standing behind it: they’re our Discovery carts staffed by student Explainers (plus some adult volunteers) who exist to share interactive learning with visitors on everything from gravity and black holes to spacesuit construction to meteorites to principles of flight and more. They set up in different areas of the museum, most often near the entrance to galleries or in open common areas, and welcome all comers.

The floor in the One World Connected gallery illustrates the relative distances of satellites in orbit around Earth. The globe at the center is an interactive, letting you explore global population, transportation, communication, and wildlife tracking as revealed by satellite information.

Director Chris Browne announced that the rest of the museum is scheduled to open on July 1, 2026; the 50th anniversary of the opening of the original museum on the Mall. Galleries opening then will include World War II in the Air; Modern Military Aviation; the super interactive, two-level How Things Fly; Living in the Space Age; At Home in Space; the new astronomy display, Discovering Our Universe; and our art gallery.

Stay tuned to the NASM website for more information, and for photos of the new galleries and exhibits!