Inside National Geographic’s brand-new Museum of Exploration

An explorer’s tools remind us that the act of discovery has always been as much about ingenuity as daring. In search of answers to the toughest questions about our world, explorers go to extremes: The bottom of the ocean. The edge of space. The empty spots on the map. And to get there, they innovate, calibrate, and iterate.

That idea is at the heart of the new National Geographic Museum of Exploration, or the MOE, a more than 100,000-square-foot, sustainably built center opening this summer in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to “inspire the explorer in every visitor,” says Emily Dunham, the National Geographic Society’s chief campus and experiences officer. Exhibits and immersive offerings include galleries drawing from a vast photo archive, towering outdoor projection screens, a 400-seat theater, and a collection of artifacts and gear that have helped propel and inspire nearly 140 years of fieldwork by National Geographic Explorers.

The four objects that follow are among the many on display at the museum—each with a story to tell about dauntless, endlessly curious individuals redefining our sense of what’s knowable.

A suit for surveying the seafloor

In 1979, off the Hawaiian island of O‘ahu, oceanographer and Explorer Sylvia Earle plunged 1,250 feet wearing an armored, pressurized suit called a Jim (named for a diver who inspired its design). “It was basically a wearable submarine,” says Society exhibition content developer Hilary Bergen, created for commercial uses like underwater maintenance and salvage. Earle, then working on a book about marine exploration for the National Geographic Society, used one to spend more than two hours walking along the seafloor, still the deepest untethered sea walk ever made. A replica Jim suit at the MOE re-creates the look of Earle’s on the day of her dive, which spurred further use of atmospheric diving suits in aquatic research, advancing our understanding of deep-sea ecosystems. Nearly five decades later, Earle is 90, still diving, and still called by the nickname she earned that day: Her Deepness.

The capsule that reached new heights

A huge helium-filled balloon lifted the nearly 13-foot-tall Explorer II gondola into the stratosphere above South Dakota one morning in November 1935. Inside the magnesium alloy orb were U.S. Army Air Corps balloonists and Explorers Albert Stevens and Orvil Anderson, who reached a record altitude of more than 13 miles above the Earth that day. The pair recorded observations about cosmic rays and solar radiation and brought back some of the first photos to show the planet’s curvature. Like the original Explorer II gondola, today in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, the reproduction at the MOE is encircled by canvas ballast bags, along with the dangling cases that carried nearly a thousand pounds of batteries to power the Explorers’ equipment.

A window into the storm

To help legendary tornado researcher and Explorer Tim Samaras glimpse the inside of a funnel cloud, National Geographic engineers created this armored, arrowhead-shaped camera housing, nicknamed Tinman and designed to keep a camera on the ground in high winds. It was just one of the instruments—many designed by Samaras—that the storm chaser and his crew placed in the path of tornadoes in order to capture never before recorded meteorological data. In 2003, in South Dakota, Samaras logged the greatest drop in pressure then ever recorded. A decade later, he was pursuing a storm in Oklahoma with his adult son and a colleague when a tornado overtook their vehicle. No one survived. Exhibiting Tinman at the MOE, Bergen says, is a tribute, an opportunity to “honor the contributions” of a one-of-a-kind scientist.

An off-road vehicle as intrepid as its owner

To seek out some of the planet’s most elusive animals—Bengal tigers, lion-tailed macaques, king cobras—wildlife photographer and filmmaker Sandesh Kadur long relied on his heavily customized 1997 Maruti Suzuki Gypsy, a kind of mobile photo studio he dubbed Gypsu. Kadur removed the vehicle’s back roof so he could stand and shoot from a higher vantage point. He installed a sliding rail for his camera to glide along and a stabilizer mount up front for filming while he drove behind swift-moving creatures—“keeping up with the action,” Kadur says. All that tinkering, says the Explorer, allowed him to “push the envelope ... of the visual storytelling in the field.” Installing the storied ride at the MOE meant lifting and lowering it into the building with a crane—one more act of ingenuity for Gypsu’s final journey.