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Comment by axelfontaine | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone needs something to add to their long list of things to do when Covid will be over, I highly recommend visiting the museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Museum_of_Cosmonautic...)

I had the chance to visit it in 2019 and it's an absolutely fascinating place. With Soyuz capsules that returned from space, Mir module replicas you can go into, asteroids you can touch, a Buran replica and an incredibly detailed walkthrough of the Soviet pioneering work at the dawn of the space race, there is simply no other place like it. Well worth it!

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Gotta say the Kennedy Space Center visitor’s center sounds very similar (they have the best Space Shuttle display is think), plus has a full Saturn V. Plus the Washington DC’s Smithsonian Air and Space Center (free... has a spare Skylab space station you can walk into, plus an Apollo-Soyuz display, plus a Moon rock you can literally touch) and the museum at the airport which has an orbiter.

It’d be fun to see these and the Moscow museum back to back to compare.

We are fortunate to live in a world with parallel space programs—that cooperate!

Yep, both the Smithsonian Air and Space Center and Steven Udvar-Hazy Center are well worth the visit. They have the Discovery, SR-71, and Enola Gay on display. Oh and the Concorde! [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_F._Udvar-Hazy_Center

In 2018 or 2019, I finally had a layover at Dulles that I was able to make into a long enough stretch that I was finally able to grab a ride and head over to the Steven Udvar-Hazy Center for a few hours.

The Museum of Flight outside Seattle is also well worth the visit and has quite of bit of space hardware in addition to planes. (It's next door to the Boeing factory.)

It was kind of weird to see Gagarin's Communist Party membership document on display at Smithsonian.

The list of planes across all of them is beyond imagination even when you list them out[0]. Some very interesting planes that were taken out of Germany to keep them out of any other nations hands are there.

The National Air and Space Museum even has the model of Star Trek's Enterprise NCC-1701 used during the show. While obviously not real the effect of the show and its ship are well documented

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_in_the_Smiths...

California Science Center is pretty good too, if you are on the left coast.

...In Los Angeles. For Bay Area folks, I can recommend the Chabot Space and Science Center, in Oakland. For Seattle, consider The Museum of Flight.

Endeavour is at CSC, not sure there are any other shuttles over here, unfortunately all the others are on the east coast I think. They should move one to the PNW in my opinion.

a Buran replica

If you want to see a real Buran, Technik Museum Speyer is nice:

https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle-buran

Though, overall, I liked Technik Museum Sinsheim more, which has both a Concorde and a Tupolev TU-144. They are fairly close together, so you can visit both of them in one or two days.

There are urbex people who took footage of a real decaying Buran in Kazakhstan. Illegally, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM

Simply out of curiosity, have you been to the Kennedy Space Center and how does it compare? As someone who was born in the USSR but hadn’t seen much of it before I left, I am very curious about the differences in attitudes and presentation with things like this.

And then visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_State_Museum_of_th... - only a short train ride away (by Russian standards) :)

Actually 2 rides: 15-16 km of subway to the Kiyevskaya railway station and 164 km to Kaluga which is the other end of that commute rail.

And to wind down after, drop by the "Museum" of Soviet arcade machines, where you can play all kinds of different arcade games. With trying to figure out whether the machine is broken or you're just using it wrong because you understand none of the description being part of the game :)

And a replica of Sputnik (the first satellite) and Laika (the first space dog, † 3 November 1957 (aged 3), on board Sputnik 2, in Low Earth orbit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika

It's probably a shame that I'm Russian and I've never been there. Theoretically I don't even need to wait for covid to be over — life is mostly back to normal already — but going to Moscow just to visit a museum is kinda meh. But I'll visit it the next time I'm in Moscow.

It sounds amazing and reminds me of the Space Museum in Huntsville, AL. It has a Saturn V motor.

Not only the engine - but in Huntsville you can see two Saturn V launch vehicles! A mock up standing, and the other one made of actual stages (not intended to fly, though).

The only other places you can see the Saturn V are the Johnson Space Center and the Kenndy Space Center.

Ohh... does it make sense to see it even if you don't speak Russian?

Absolutely! I don't speak a word of Russian and used their excellent audio guide in English.

Used to be tours going to Baikonur launches. Atleast $5000.

Agreed

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