The K. Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics

Kaluga, a big city situated 200 km southwest of Moscow, is known as ‘the cradle of cosmonautics”. It is here that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founder of astronautic theory, lived at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries. It is not surprising that in 1961, a few months after the first manned space flight, during his visit to Kaluga Yuri Gagarin laid the first symbolic stone in the foundations of the first space museum of the USSR. The building on the right bank of the Oka River is an outstanding example of Soviet architecture.
The thematic sections of the museum’s exhibition tell the history of aeronautics, aviation, rocket and space technology, and visitors have an opportunity to learn about Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s heritage. In the museum collection of Soviet and Russian spacecraft there are artificial Earth satellites, including a duplicate of the first artificial Earth satellite, the first space probes launched to the Moon, Venus, and Mars.
Among the museum exhibits, you can see authentic lunar soil and the Mir core module life-sized model.
The section devoted to manned astronautics is of the greatest interest. Here you can see the unique authentic spacecraft that have been in space. Among them there are the descent modules of the spacecraft Vostok 5 and Soyuz 34, and the ballistic reentry capsule “Raduga”. Various types of "space outfit" (space suits, flight suits, preventive suits for training in orbit), space food, space instruments, and devices for working in outer space are on display in the museum.
Full-dome programmes that give visitors the impression of floating in space are shown in the planetarium of the museum.

Kaluga Oblast
2, Academician Korolev Str., Kaluga
Web site: www.gmik.ru

In the museum grounds, you can see a technological duplicate of the launch vehicle Vostok that carried Yuri Gagarin into space on April 12, 1961.

there is a public transport stop at Tsiolkovsky Park located 300 meters from the museum. You can get there from the Kaluga railway and bus station by trolleybus N 1 and minibus N 1.