The Moonshot Museum, which will be Pennsylvania's first space museum when it opens later this year at Astrobotic Technologies Inc.'s North Side headquarters, announced it reached $1.7 million in fundraising as part of its $2.7 million capital campaign.
A $500,000 award from the Henry L. Hillman Foundation represented the largest chunk of the most recent fundraising efforts. It'll be used to build out the museum's media production and exhibition fabrications. The Allegheny Foundation and the Howmet Aerospace Foundation also each awarded the museum $250,000 in funding to support construction and operations-related expenses. Finally, the Buhl Foundation, the Grable Foundation and the Remmel Foundation each contributed $25,000 in funding as part of the most recent round.
According to Sam Moore, the museum's executive director, the latest batch of funding brings Moonshot's construction closer to launch, which Moore said will hopefully begin in the coming months. He also said the museum is tentatively planning to open its doors to the public by September 2022.
"We're right on the precipice of pulling the trigger on our application and construction contracts," Moore said. "We anticipate that's going to start late spring to get us to the point of opening in September, but we do have some more upfront funding that we do need to raise, and we're really optimistic about how the first quarter is going to go from that perspective and especially coming off the end of the year that we just had."
Moonshot Museum at Astrobotic's Northside headquarters final renderings
The latest batch of funding will also see Moore gain a new colleague over the course of the next week — a manager of learning programs — and will bring the museum's total employee count to two full-time workers. By the time it's ready to open its doors, Moore estimates there will be about two-to-three full-time employees and up to five part-time employees who are working at the 3,000-square-foot museum.
Operated by the nonprofit Astrobotic Foundation, which works in partnership with the Pittsburgh-based aerospace and robotics company Astrobotic, the Moonshot Museum will allow visitors to see first-hand the developments and construction of lunar landers, rovers and other technologies that will someday end up on the moon or in space. It will also include exhibits and educational programs on aerospace career paths.
