Astrobotic’s Moonshot Museum is (almost) ready to blast off, and the North Side venue now has a mission open time: mid-October.
That’s around the same time that Astrobotic — the company whose headquarters the museum is a part of — plans to start launching its Pittsburgh-made Peregrine Lander to the moon.
It’s those same rovers that visitors can gawk at in this place. A wall of plexiglass is all that will separate museumgoers from a lunar lander — and not a replica of one, but one with big travel plans in its future. And that means the engineers tinkering with the lander are also on display.
“Think of an aquarium, and divers inside the aquarium, you know, feeding the fish,” said museum Director Sam Moore. “You're going to see people with the hairnets and the beard nets and the full-body suits inside the smaller cleanroom here. They will be doing the work of space.”
Pittsburgh isn’t lacking for museums, but Moonshot Museum is a new model. It’s the offspring of a tech startup, a 3,000-square-foot space tucked inside the company’s headquarters and centering on the company’s product — which means it’s somewhat an advertisement for the company.
But what the museum primarily promotes isn’t the company’s own space products, but space work in general. The museum aims to shine light on the myriad jobs — from engineering to design to communications — that go into planning a trip to the moon by making them transparent.
And literally transparent.
As Mr. Moore spoke, a man in a white lab coat, hairnet and beard net walked by on the other side of the plexiglass making notes on his clipboard. (Even space jobs have paperwork.)
“Part of the reason why we're here is to build this new model for nonprofit education to come together and talk career readiness and workforce development,” Mr. Moore said.
And as the privatized space industry continues to develop, space work could become an increasingly common way to make a living. A 2021 report by Citigroup predicted the space industry will reach $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2040.
For the past decade, that growth has been led by private enterprises — most famously, by companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, but also Pittsburgh’s own Astrobotic, which benefited from the Obama-cosigned Space Act of 2015 that eased private companies’ barriers to space entry.
Space-industry jobs have surged accordingly. Between 2010 and 2021, posted openings for space industry jobs rose more than 500%, according to a report by labor market data provider Lightcast.
“The hope is to go beyond engineering,” Mr. Moore said, discussing the variety of displays planned for Moonshot Museum. “So looking at how, you know, space needs designers. It needs policymakers to answer big questions that we have about space and the future of space exploration. It needs welders and HVAC technicians. There's a whole industry that really is bigger than what a lot of people have in mind when they think space.”
A CMU spinoff
Astrobotic has created space jobs here in Pittsburgh, with a team of about 180 working on the North Side.
The company started in 2007 at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, where it developed its signature Peregrine Lander. If all goes to plan, the lander will be the first commercial spacecraft to land on the surface of the moon later this year, and the first American lander on the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
The lander is designed to deliver customer payloads — that is, cargo that customers pay to place on it — to the moon, and its first mission will transport equipment for a variety of private companies and government agencies, including NASA.
Moonshot Museum will operate as its own nonprofit with an independent board of directors, but its plexiglass looks past the cleanroom — a space kept free of dust and other contaminants that could disrupt the rover’s sensitive system — into Astrobotic’s Mission Control.
Although the company’s landers will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., they’ll be guided to the moon by workers following along from Pittsburgh. And visitors will be able to watch.
“When there's a landing, or when there's an event happening inside this building, we want as many kids as possible in the space,” Mr. Moore said.
When asked how Astrobotic’s staff might feel about a class of middle schoolers watching them work, he laughed. “If I were in middle school, I would definitely tap on the glass,” he said.
Space exhibits
On certain days, the coexistence of the lander-production facilities and the museum will be a tight squeeze.
Astrobotic employees will need to roll landers through the exhibition space just to get them out of the building and onto the trucks that will take them to Cape Canaveral. Accordingly, all the exhibitions were designed to be quickly folded up and packed away.
Mr. Moore hopes this will be an opportunity rather than a hassle.
“So whenever that happens, we'll do all the moving that we need to do, and then the community gets to be a part of a spacecraft leaving Pittsburgh to head down for launch, too,” he said. That way, he added, people can feel like “they're really part of the mission from start to finish, having watched it come together on the other side of the cleanroom.”
Besides, there will be plenty else to keep visitors busy. To further its promotion of space work, Moonshot Museum will feature interactive exhibits, each requiring guests to practice a different skill set.
In one, museum workers will guide visitors through a game in which they role play as members of a “cosmic city council,” making important decisions for a hypothetical lunar settlement.
Another section focuses on art and design, and asks visitors to create their own mission patches. And anyone who visits will have the chance to write or draw their own message or art, which will be loaded onto an SD card that will travel on the next lunar mission — so in a way, everyone goes to space.
So far, the museum has been able to raise just under $2.6 million of its $2.7 million goal for museum funding, which includes seed funding from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. Educational partners chipped in as well, such as the Penn State Readiness Institute and the Carnegie Science Center, which is just down the road. Moonshot Museum has yet to determine admission fees, but plans on being open Wednesday through Sunday to the general public.
In 2021, Astrobotic and Carnegie Science Center announced they would partner to create a permanent exhibition at the science center called “Our Destiny in Space,” also designed to teach children about possible space jobs. The exhibition will open later this year.
“I want people to visit Moonshot Museum and then walk down the hill to go to the science center,” Mr. Moore said.
It’s all part of a push for space readiness in the Pittsburgh region, which has contributed to moon travel since Westinghouse designed equipment for some of the first landers in the 1960s.
“Space [work] has traditionally been behind locked doors,” Mr. Moore said. “There will come a moment when I can't allow a picture, probably, but for the most part, you know, this is going to be an open book.”
Noelle Mateer: nmateer@post-gazette.com.
First Published: July 26, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: July 26, 2022, 11:12 a.m.
