Humans have landed on the moon six times, the last more than 50 years ago. But according to the folks at the Moonshot Museum, we’d better get ready, because many more are to come.
The museum, which opens Saturday, operates in partnership -- and shares a building -- with space-robotics firm Astrobotic Technology. It’s the first space museum in Pennsylvania and, it claims, the first anywhere to focus on space-career readiness.
“The museum was really designed with that idea of preparing our regional community for the future space industry and, I think, introducing folks to all the careers that are available to them,” said Mike Hennessy, the museum’s manager of learning and programs, during a press preview this week.
Careers in the space industry can take many forms. But most obvious to Moonshot visitors will be those of the engineers and technicians in the “clean room” behind a big glass window, busy completing Astrobotic’s first lunar lander, Peregrine 1.
Dressed in white lab coats, hair nets and blue booties, they tinkered with the 6-feet-tall, 8-feet wide lander under fluorescent light while on the opposite side of the glass, workers put the finishing touches on the museum.
“You can look through the glass, and see fellow Pittsburghers who specialize in engineering, in HVAC technology, in the trades, creating this amazing spacecraft that’s heading to the lunar surface in just a few months!” Hennessy said.
“You’ll be able to come in any time you’re here and watch real time space work happen,” said museum director Sam Moore. “Our hope is that you leave knowing a little bit more about how space is impacting your life and potentially about a career opportunity in space that you didn’t know existed.”
The 3,000-square-foot museum also feature a 1/30-scale replica of the Vulcan Centaur rocket that’s scheduled to blast the Peregrine into space early next year. That will make the Peregrine the first U.S. spacecraft to reach the moon since 1972. But it won’t carry any people. Rather, it will hold 24 payloads, including scientific instruments from NASA, several other nation’s space agencies, and Carnegie Mellon University, and even a Bitcoin.
The museum is run by an independent nonprofit created by Astrobotic. So, it’s no surprise it uses the company's wares as Exhibit A to demonstrate Pittsburgh’s leading role in the space industry of the future.
Moore said the museum has completed its initial $2.7 million capital campaign. Major funders include the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the Henry L. Hillman Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, the Burke Foundation, and the Howmet Aerospace Foundation.
The museum views lunar landings as the leading edge of efforts to create long-term human settlements on the moon. So in addition to a test-model of a small Astrobotic lunar rover, Moonshot houses murals depicting a vision of such future settlements, with habitations perhaps fabricated out of the very lunar soil by 3D printers.
“We want to go to the moon to see if we can develop those technologies that will allow us to explore other harsh areas in space,” said Hennesy.
A significant portion of the museum looks to the moon’s future as the possible site of the mining of water and minerals.
One interactive exhibit asks visitors to work in teams to outfit a small lunar rover with the tools and power sources it would need to extract water from lunar ice, deposited – mostly at the poles -- by comets over the millennia.
The water might be used to supply human settlements on the moon, or even as a source of hydrogen for rocket fuel, said Hennessy. He said minerals with industrial uses found on the moon include titanium, silicon and platinum.
On Earth, mining has proved ecologically destructive, and one Moonshot exhibit acknowledges that expanding extractive industries off-planet might be controversial. Hennessy calls the exhibit a “cosmic city council” where, via touchscreen, visitors can vote on such questions as whether we should mine on the moon, how to manage settlements there, or whether to allow tourist rockets, which damage the ozone layer and contribute to global warming.
Questions about conservation, ethics, and even ownership of the moon are largely up in the air, Moore said.
“We don’t have any of the answers for that yet,” he said. “It’s going to be on the middle-schoolers of today to come up with those answers over the next 20, 30, 40 years.”
