Houston Museum of Natural Science

While the Houston Museum of Natural Science features pretty much what you'd expect from a museum of natural science, the Isaac Arnold Hall of Space Science features a number of artifacts from the early space program.

I recently checked the museum's Website, and was unable to find any trace of Arnold Hall or any of the artifacts. The museum did have a Facebook post about it back in 2019, and an email to the museum confirmed that the space artifacts were still on exhibit as of August 2025.

Aerial view.

We visited HMNS in the summer of 2008. Now, I usually have a summer's trip planned and hotels booked by late February or early March. A couple of weeks before the trip I follow up and re-check all museums' hours and whatnot. When I checked HMNS, I found that their website listed the space exhibit galleries as "temporarily closed."

After a series of emails, I found that the room in which the Mercury spacecraft was located was closed to the general public because it was being used as a classroom for a summer children's education program. However, one of the museum staff (hi, Caleb!) volunteered to come in on a Saturday morning to grant us access. More than just that, Caleb did anything he could to help out, rearranging the room lighting to cut down glare on the glass and setting up a table to use as a scaffold on which to set up my tripod. Caleb made what could have been a disappointment into the picture set you see here.

As of now, I have not yet sorted through all of my pictures from HMNS, but some other page references this location. Thus, this is a "place holder" version right now, with only the pictures actually referenced. Come back some time later to see if I've finished up, or drop me an email to request me to prioritize the rest of these pictures.