Abstract
From October 1965 to May 1966, the Science Museum in London displayed the American spacecraft Freedom 7, the first capsule in the NASA’s Mercury Programme to take a human on a sub-orbital flight. Archival records concerning this temporary display are extensive and contain written sources as well as photographic ones. This case therefore lends itself quite nicely to a study aimed at evaluating the comparative merits of these two types of records, for understanding the logic at play in the display, and for retrieving at least part of the visitors’ experience. Unwritten sources emerge from this comparison as invaluable records for accessing the materiality of this temporary exhibition. They demonstrate that the Freedom 7 Special Exhibition was a key moment in the establishment of a space science and technology section at the Science Museum, as it enabled the museum to begin historicizing this then new field of scientific and technological enquiry. The exhibition follows a logic of display theorised in 1950 by Henry Calvert, in a note recently discovered in the Science Museum’s archives. It is based on the display of a star object which draws visitors’ attention towards less charismatic exhibits.
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