Pictures from the Space Museum in Samara that I visited earlier this week. The ground floor has real-life rocket parts (fuel tanks, engines etc). I’m not good at that technical stuff and can’t tell you much, but everything was huge, lots of steel and wires. They were parts that were made in Samara.
The second floor was more newby-friendly and also came with a cute guy who gave us a presentation. It had models of Sputnik, Lunokhod and a few other Soviet space crafts. It had a real “phantom manequin”—life-size model of Yuri Gagarin with a bunch of sensors that measured space radiation. This manequin has actually been in space (before Yuri)!
The second floor exhibition also had some really interesting items that came in from the Moscow Polytechnical Museum—miniature scenes of [imagined] Mars colonization, Lunar station, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky ideas that he had for space travel (it was way before the first rocket actually was built). Also there were vintage prototypes that enhance human body or help people with disabilities (exoskeleton from Yugoslavia, Soviet exo-arm etc.) Creepy but also cool. But creepy.