SEATTLE, April 19, 2024—Installation is underway with The Museum of Flight’s newest creation, Home Beyond Earth, an immersive new exhibition that looks at the past, present and future of living in orbit around the Earth. Opening June 8, the exhibit offers visitors digital "passports" that will allow them to personalize their journey through the exhibit and build an imagined life in a space station of their choice. Home Beyond Earth will also visualize the story of space stations with large digital projections and over fifty artifacts, models, space-flown objects and uniforms.
Our new era of spaceflight promises space hotels, orbiting cities and industrial jobs on the Moon. Home Beyond Earth shows how far we have come in realizing this vision and helps us ponder the consequences of moving humankind from the home planet. The exhibit will be included with general admission be free to Museum Members. The exhibit closes Jan. 20, 2025.
MEDIA PREVIEW on June 6 at 11 a.m. with the exhibit designers and developers.
Home Beyond Earth – Grand Opening and Beyond
The exhibit opens on June 8 with a full day of space-related programs and family activities. The Museum will continue to compliment the exhibition for the rest of the year with fun and thought-provoking events about space life. Astronauts, space industry leaders, authors and futurists will cover topics ranging from sci-fi and living in space with disabilities, to space archeology and space law. Home Beyond Earth will also delightfully spice up the Museum’s seasonal events and weekly family activities.
Home Beyond Earth Interactives
Every exhibit visitor can choose to receive a “Passport to Space” digital card to discover what their life could look like on a future space settlement. The visitor's goal is to create their path by choosing a space station to live in, discover how their personal interests lead to jobs needed on future space stations, and finally, see the ambitions and concerns shared between different communities as space settlement becomes more realistic.
Home Beyond Earth Artifacts
Vintage space suits include Christopher Cassidy’s flight suit worn on the International Space Station; Yury Glaskov’s flight suit worn on Salyut 5; Wendy Lawrence’s Mir-era Russian "Penguin" suit; and Ed Gibson’s Skylab flight suit.
Artifacts from Skylab include: a pair of shoes worn in service at the space station, and the training version of a special-made cable cutter devised for spacwwalking astronauts of Skylab 1 to free the station’s jammed solar arrays and rescue the mission. There are also samples of the material used to make the sunshade for space station.
The exhibit includes a test version of a 3D printer called the Refabricator. The Refabricator is a recycler and 3D printer combo about the size of a mini-fridge. A flight unit was launched to the International Space Station in 2018.
Vintage corporate scale models include those of Skylab, USAF Manned Orbiting Laboratory, Rockwell International Orbital Habitat Laboratory Cutaway, and the Boeing Nuclear Power Space Base.
Astronauts feel more at home beyond Earth when they can sip hot drinks from the rim of a cup, something that was impossible before the Space Cup. The Space Cup’s specific design uses known geometry, gathered in prior International Space Station research, to direct fluids (espresso) to the lips of the user in microgravity.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact:
Ted Huetter/Senior Public Relations Manager
T: 206.768.7105 C: 206.455.5360 Email: thuetter@museumofflight.org
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