page_title: Museum of Life and Science
section_title: Aerospace
hierarchical_section_title: Museum of Life and Science / Exhibits / Aerospace
caption_attribution_description: English: Mercury-Atlas 5 capsule held Enos, a chimpanzee, as he orbited the earth twice on November 29, 1961. This flight was the final test before John Glen's first U.S. orbiting human. Here the capsule is on display at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science.
context_page_description: The Museum of Life and Science—previously known as the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science and the NC Children's Museum—is an 84-acre science museum located in Durham, North Carolina, United States, featuring an array of largely hands-on exhibits intended to spark curiosity and wonder. With a focus on STEM learning, the Museum's mission is to create a place of lifelong learning where people of all ages embrace science as a way of knowing about themselves, their community, and their world.
  The museum exists in the midst the Northgate Park neighborhood, bisected by Murray Avenue. The main building is located on the north tract, along with the Butterfly House, Hideaway Woods, Farmyard, Sprout Cafe, Explore the Wild nature park, Catch the Wind, Dinosaur Trail, and the 2 ft narrow gauge Ellerbe Creek C.P. Huntington train ride. The Museum features both indoor and outdoor learning environments. The southern tract is now largely devoted to parking and administrative buildings, including a parking deck completed in early 2018. Prior to the construction of the new main building in the early 1990s, the structures on the southern tract contained the bulk of the museum's exhibit space.
context_section_description: The MLS has historically been most notable for its Aerospace exhibit, which focuses on the early NASA space program. Most of the artifacts on display are on long-term loan from the National Air and Space Museum. Many of these are significant Project Apollo-related artifacts, such as a Moon rock, Neil Armstrong's dosimeter, an Apollo Command Module test vehicle, a portion of an Apollo Lunar Rover, and a full-sized mock-up of a Lunar Module. The MLS came into possession of these artifacts through the influence of James E. Webb, the second NASA administrator and a native of North Carolina. Instrumental in the acquisition of the NASA artifacts was Richard Wescott, the executive director of the museum at the time.
  Aerospace includes a hands-on aerodynamics space, Launch Lab, that features paper airplane launchers and wind tunnels.
caption: The Project Mercury space capsule used in the November 29, 1961 Mercury-Atlas 5 mission, on which the chimpanzee Enos became the only chimpanzee and third primate to orbit the Earth, is exhibited at the museum
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