America 250: The Future of Commercial Space (Part 2)

Ed, welcome to the Futures in Space Gallery. This gallery opened at the National Air and Space Museum in July of 2025, and this is an opportunity for us to really look towards the future. We have examples of technologies that represent sort of broader themes in commercial spaceflight. So one of the things that we did want to represent is the story of reusability. You really cannot have a viable space business without reusing your technologies. And so two of the reusable technologies behind me include a grid fin, as well as a Merlin SpaceX engine that flew on multiple missions. And then we also have a mock-up of the Blue Origin crew capsule that is a fully reusable spacecraft. So those are some of the examples of the technologies we have in here. We at the FAA know there's an incredible amount of technology being developed right now for commercial spaceflight. That must also pose an interesting challenge for you folks as curators. Absolutely. You know, none of these technologies or feats come out of thin air. They're always dependent on the invention of technologies and the ingenuity of people that came before. So it's really an exciting opportunity to try to tell these stories and to collect them. But it's also a challenge at the same time. We can't collect it all, so we need to decide which stories we want to highlight. But we don't have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. We don't know which programs will be a success, which will fail, which will be short-lived, or which will be revived. So we're actively collecting every single day, trying to represent what's going on in commercial spaceflight.