Golden Cube Turns 50: Space Museum to induct Kelly Twins, Mercury 13, and Other Pioneers Saturday Night in Alamogordo

ALAMOGORDO, N.M. — The New Mexico Museum of Space History marks a half-century on the hill above Alamogordo Saturday night, pairing its Golden Jubilee with the induction of a new class into the International Space Hall of Fame.

The gala, titled “Golden Jubilee: 50 Years of Honoring Yesterday and Inspiring Tomorrow,” runs from 5 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 3, at the Tays Special Event Center. The museum’s formal dedication was Oct. 5, 1976. Organizers moved the public celebration to the weekend.

Tickets are $90 per person, or $81 for museum members. Dress is semi-formal or business formal. The evening includes a cocktail hour, dinner, a keynote, the induction ceremony, and a silent auction. Doors open at 5 p.m., guests are seated at 6, the program starts at 6:15, the keynote is introduced at 6:30, inductions begin at 7, closing remarks are at 8, and the silent auction is announced at 8:30.

The Class of 2026

The International Space Hall of Fame Foundation Induction Committee selected the class from 45 nominees submitted from around the country. The Governor’s Commission to the New Mexico Museum of Space History confirmed the selections on Feb. 27. The Hall of Fame currently lists 174 inductees, including one team.

The 2026 honorees are:

• The Mercury 13, the 13 American women who, in a privately funded program from 1959 to 1960, completed the same medical and psychological screening used on NASA’s Mercury astronaut candidates. The museum lists them as Jerrie Cobb, Myrtle Cagle, Jane Hart, Rhea Hurrle (Woltman), Jean Hixson, Irene Leverton, Sarah Gorelick (Ratley), Jerri Sloan (Truhill), Bernice Steadman, Gene Nora Stumbough (Jessen), Wally Funk, Jan Dietrich, and Marion Dietrich. Space author Loretta Hall will accept on their behalf.

• Mark Kelly and Scott Kelly, NASA’s identical-twin astronauts. Scott Kelly’s nearly year-long stay on the International Space Station, paired with Mark Kelly as the Earth-bound control, produced the NASA Twins Study on how long-duration flight changes the human body. Mark Kelly is also a U.S. senator from Arizona.

• Michel Mayor, the Swiss astrophysicist who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for the first confirmed exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star.

• Creola Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician whose trajectory calculations supported Project Mercury, the Apollo missions, and early Space Shuttle flights. Mayor Sharon McDonald will be receiving on the family’s behalf. 

• Dolores “Dee” O’Hara, NASA’s first aerospace nurse, assigned to the Mercury astronauts and a pioneer in space medicine. O’Hara, who recently turned 91, is a confirmed attendee.

“It is an honor and a privilege to welcome the Selectees to Alamogordo for the Induction Ceremony,” Museum Executive Director Karen Kincaid Brady said in the museum’s announcement. In an earlier statement on the class, she tied the evening to both the museum’s 50th year and the nation’s 250th, calling the inductees people “who have dedicated their lives to exploring and understanding our universe.”

A hall of fame born from a baseball commercial

The museum began as an idea in 1973. Former Alamogordo Mayor Dwight Ohlinger, after seeing a commercial for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, argued that if Cooperstown could honor baseball, Alamogordo could honor space — and that the Tularosa Basin, with its rocket and missile history, was the place to do it. Gov. Bruce King folded the proposal into the state’s cultural affairs office. Architects Charles E. Nolan and Associates designed the gold-tinted glass cube. It was dedicated Oct. 5, 1976, as the International Space Hall of Fame and opened to the public on Nov. 23, 1976.

The campus is a Smithsonian Affiliate and a division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, overseen by the Governor’s Commission. It includes the museum, the Hall of Fame, the John P. Stapp Air and Space Park, the Daisy Track, the Clyde W. Tombaugh Education Center, the New Horizons Dome Theater and Planetarium, and the Astronaut Memorial Garden. On Aug. 8 the museum opened “To Build a Space Museum,” an exhibit on how the golden cube came to be.

Sponsors of Saturday’s gala include the International Space Hall of Fame Foundation, the Sacramento Mountains Foundation, the Buller Family, Future Real Estate, Christus Health, and SkyView2U.

Tickets are available at nmspacemuseum.org and spacehalloffame.org.

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