The Museum of the History of Cosmonautics is the first museum in Russia dedicated to space flights and space exploration. It is located near Tsiolkovsky Park, where the great Russian scientist, the founder of rocket science and cosmonautics, is buried.
On June 13, 1961, two months after their flight into space, Yuri Gagarin and Sergey Korolev arrived in Kaluga and laid the foundation stone of the Cosmonautics Museum. On October 3, 1967, the Museum of the History of Cosmonautics in Kaluga received its first visitors. After Yuri Gagarin, all cosmonauts, returning from space, come to Kaluga to visit the Cosmonautics Museum and the Tsiolkovsky Memorial House Museum.
There are thousands of exhibits in the upper and lower halls of the museum. In the foyer of the museum, the artist Andrey Vasnetsov laid out a huge mosaic panel "Conquerors of Space". He made it with smalt using the technology of Byzantine mosaics. The Museum has exhibits that were presented by Sergey Korolev. Many of the museum`s exhibits have been in space and exist in a single copy.
The exposition of the Museum of the History of Cosmonautics in Kaluga was created in chronological order from fantastic ideas to the implementation of space programs. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky has lived and worked in Kaluga for more than 30 years. Followers of Tsiolkovsky wrote about his works: "The inventive works of Tsiolkovsky seem to be a transitional bridge between fiction and reality."
At first, the inhabitants of Kaluga considered Tsiolkovsky an ordinary eccentric, but his ideas about space flights were later realized by Korolev. In the Museum you can see numerous spacecraft, satellites, probes, lunar rovers, rocket engines and dozens of other large and small spacecrafts related to space research. There are also numerous documents, drawings, photographs that allow us to understand in more detail the stages of the development of cosmonautics.
On the second floor there is a life-size model of the base module of the Mir space station. Visitors can enter it and see the conditions how astronauts live and work during space flights.
A hemisphere is built into the building of the Museum of the History of Cosmonautics. This is the Kaluga Planetarium. Visitors can feel there like astronomers and see constellations, planets, nebulae of distant galaxies, solar and lunar eclipses, the Milky Way and many other fascinating things in the sky.
In 2021, a large open-air museum complex was opened near the museum. Here you can see the Vostok rocket, on which Yuri Gagarin made his first space flight. On the site in front of the museum there are various rockets designed by Sergei Korolev and other spaceships.
