By: Anna Musun-Miller
Last week we introduced you to Sam Moore, former Executive Director of Moonshot Museum, who began sharing with us the impressive history of the Moonshot Museum from conception to build to opening in just under two years. He began highlighting the future of the space industry, collaboration between cultural attractions and corporations, the responsibility of cultural institutions for community career readiness, and what it means to be a museum. If you haven’t yet read that article, click here to access it. This week we continue to explore the guest experience and cross-pollination possibilities for this unique experience, including exhibition development and fundraising processes.
So how does the guest experience work at the Moonshot Museum?
We have two modes of operation. Our public visitation mode, which is the Saturday afternoon experience that you would have if you came to visit us, is a self-guided, more traditional museum experience. You watch a video first in our Moonshot theater, a screen rises for a grand reveal of the spacecraft under assembly in the clean room, and then you step into our space and explore the interactives in the gallery.
What we spent even more time and brain power developing is what we call mission mode. With a push of a button, all the interactives from our public visitation mode change to this facilitated mission experience. We send field trip students on a simulated lunar mission. Each station behaves differently, the show control system tracks your progress and talks to you throughout the museum, you’re on a timer, and at the end you get a manifest of how you did. The whole experience centers on challenges that real space industry professionals face every day in engineering and science, but also in politics, design, and marketing.
This mission mode is designed so that over time we can build out a catalog of these experiences. Right now, we have one mission called Lunar Settlers, focused on setting up the first permanent human settlement on the surface of the moon. The idea is that you can do that mission this week, and next week you could come back and do a new mission, maybe about lunar entrepreneurship or crime on the moon. The catalog of experiences will be developed in collaboration with teachers and prototyped with students to really meet students where they are and meet the needs of teachers. It’ll help keep us evergreen as we move forward. It’s pretty unusual and is an operational model that we continue to iterate.
It’s very cool to think that while I know how we’ll be using Moonshot Museum six months from now, I have no clue how that gallery will be used three years from now, and that’s on purpose. We’ve set the stage for both student programming and a general visitor experience that can both evolve over time.
It seems like this idea could live anywhere, if it weren’t for your relationship with Astrobotic.
We built Moonshot Museum on the idea that you can see spacecraft under construction and you might meet a space industry professional. When you come, you’re coming into the building where the largest lunar logistics company in the world is doing its work.
I don’t think we could pack up and move Moonshot Museum into an empty warehouse. A lot of the interactives don’t need a wall of clean room windows to function and teach you about space, but what makes it special is that the real time work is happening on the other side of the glass.
What I hope we see moving forward more is that this isn’t so remarkable. A lot of companies have the elbow room for a public-facing space. If they really mean it when they say we need to develop the next generation of professionals in these industries, we need to do more than the annual career fair or student visit to tour the shop floor. Astrobotic has been open to this model where engagement of kids is an investment in the future of the space industry.
Here in Pittsburgh, we have big companies like Google, Duolingo, and Aurora Autonomous Driving, and any one of those companies could set aside permanent space inside their facilities and create incredible experiences for students. Five years from now, I’d love to see more companies creating a place for career readiness programming within their spaces.
I know you have experience in a whole range of contexts, including a conservation organization. Do you see a connection between the work that conservation organizations do – helping people imagine themselves as conservationists and feeling motivated to take action – and the work happening at Moonshot?
That’s really interesting. My background is in history museums. Stepping into my role at the National Aviary, the thing that was most interesting to me was the shift in mission – I went from talking about the past and learning lessons that help us build a shared future to saving the world because the planet is dying. That’s a big mission!
With zoos, with space museums, people are coming to see birds and have a nice day or live out their science fiction fantasy and learn a little about space. They aren’t coming to save the world necessarily. They aren’t coming to unpack the big problems that we as a species have to deal with when it comes to the planet we’re on now or space exploration. There are some parallels there. Being clever about how you share the conservation messages in the midst of the fun, the experience people are there for – those are lessons I learned at the Aviary that I could apply at Moonshot Museum. You might not think space is part of your everyday, but let us prove to you that it is, so that you keep space in mind as you go about your day. That’s pretty similar to what we were trying to do at the Aviary – think about the impact you’re having on the world around you and the animals you share it with in your everyday life.
It seems to me that the same kind of learnings could extend outside of institutions that deal in science, whether it’s space or animals, and that there’s a lot to be learned here for any cultural attraction that’s guest-facing.
Absolutely. As a history museum person – which I absolutely am – my impression of science museums was a little dismissive. I thought their focus was on whizz-bang, on experience over content. There are big lessons to be learned for history museums from science museums, like how we design from the beginning with visitors in mind, not from the story we want to tell exclusively. Are we talking about visitors at the beginning of the design process, or are we having a quick conversation at the end about where the benches go? Zoos and science museums do a really good job of getting people in the door, which is something that history museums struggle with.
Having been so close to a startup, to a space company, has also really changed how I view the exhibition development process and fundraising process. We’re very intentional in museums and sometimes move very slowly because of that. We could be a bit quicker and looser, with the idea from the beginning that something might not work.
I’ll leave Moonshot with a startup mindset in how I approach museum work for the rest of my career. Moonshot Museum was a startup nonprofit, which was very weird for me to say at the beginning – there are no startup museums, that’s not how museums work – but it’s a startup museum, built from the ground up, changing constantly, trying new things, and I think there are some really value lessons to be learned there. Because if you try something, you might fail, but then again it might work.
