Cosmonautics Museum in Petropavlovskaya fortress

Cosmonautics and Rocket Technology Museum of professor Glushko was not incidentally created in the rooms of Ioannovsky (John`s) Ravelin of Peter and Paul Fortress. It was there that the 2nd department of the Gas-Dymanics Laboratory (GDL), the first domestic design and experimental organization for rocket engine development, was located in 1932-1933.

Test stands for electric and liquid rocket engines were there. The department of GDL of Peter and Paul Fortress was directed by Valentine Petrovich Glushko, who is considered the founder of Soviet aerospace engine building.

The first rooms of the museum are dedicated to the inventions and works of Constantine Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, the founder of modern cosmonautics. In the following rooms you can see the reconstructions of work rooms of designers, laboratory and workshops, as well as documents and photos related to the work of GDL.

Then you can see a big room with the samples of liquid rocket engines, which were created in this laboratory, as well as the subsequent designs made on their basis: main engines of space rockets. There you can see a lot of interesting exhibits: smokeless powder rockets (for multiple rocket launcher BМ-13 «Katyusha»), the model of the first artificial satellite of the Earth launched on October 4, 1957, the model of the spacecraft «Vostok», which was flown by the world’s first cosmonaut Y. А. Gagarin. Of a special interest is the capsule of the spacecraft «Soyuz-16», which had been to space and returned to the Earth in December 1974.

In 1933 the Gas-Dymanics Laboratory was integrated with Moscow Group of Jet Propulsion Examination (GIRD), and then Jet Propulsion Scientific Research Institute was created on the base of their works. After that the rooms of Ioannovsky Ravelin stood empty until academician V. Glushko suggested to create a museum there in 1973.