Rays to host Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit will be touring 50% of MLB’s ballparks this summer.

The Smithsonian is calling it Apollo at the Park.

America’s Favorite Pastime Meets History’s Greatest Adventure

Join us this summer at your hometown MLB ballpark to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. Apollo at the Park, launching in June and continuing into the fall of 2019, will place 15 replica statues of Neil Armstrong’s iconic spacesuit in ballparks across country.

Apollo 11 was the collective achievement of 400,000 individuals working together towards a common goal. To highlight this national effort, the Museum is bringing a piece of Apollo to Americans across the country. As our national pastime, baseball provides countless exciting moments for millions of Americans every year and MLB ballparks are the perfect venues for new generations to learn more about that summer night 50 years ago.

Moving the space suits are no easy feat, but thanks to the modern wonder of science, those who visit the touring suit will not only see it, but be able to get up close and personal.

As part of a Kickstarter to conserve and digitize Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit, and put it back on display for the first time in over a decade, the spacesuit was 3D scanned. Those scans were used to create an authentic replica of the suit to give ballpark visitors a look at the suit’s many intricate details.

Visitors will be able to scan the suit through bar codes to, “Unlock exclusive content about the Apollo 11 mission through a digital content activation only available when interacting with the suit.”

This is an incredible opportunity to interact with a piece of history as the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing approaches.

On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility, and humans stepped foot on the Moon for the first time. With that historic achievement, Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins became American heroes and earned international acclaim. The Apollo program remains the only time in history that humans have set foot on another celestial body. Apollo at the Park celebrates the astronauts who took our first small steps beyond Earth and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who worked together to make one giant leap for all humankind

NASA plans return to the moon by 2024 as part of the next phase of space exploration (a leading driver of the economy in Florida and of many technological advancements we all enjoy in our daily lives) according to an announcement made earlier this week:

You can read the full press release from The Smithsonian National Air and Space musiem here, including this tidbit:

A ballpark stadium seat is roughly the same size as the Apollo 11 capsule seat that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins sat in for 3 days on their journey to the moon.

The suit begins travelling the country in June, Tropicana Field dates TBD.