Buran-Energia

Few months ago I visited the museum of the Peenemunde launch base, at the seaside of the Baltic sea in ex-GDR.

This museum is very interesting even if most of the former installations were destroyed.

Visit begins here.

When I went to French Guyana in October/November 2009, in particular to visit the space center and to attend a launch of Ariane 5, I visited the space museum of Kourou. This museum is in fact near the technical center of the space base, few kilometers aways from the city.

It is mainly dedicated to the Ariane program and shows the evolution of this launcher through the years.

The visit begins here.

Launch of Ariane 5 V192 that I attended:

From April 5 to August 28 at the Palais de la Découverte in Paris take place an exhibition about the historic flight of Yuri Gagarin, and some important dates of the space exploration.

This exhibition is made of very interesting photographs chosen by the Russian press agency RIA Novosti.

On Monday evening April, 4th was the inauguration of this exhibition with Russian and French cosmonauts and the Russian ambassador Alexander Orlov.

The cosmonauts were:

- Serguey Zhukov, russian cosmonaut,
- Alexander Skvorstov, russian cosmonaut, Soyuz TMA – 18,
- Jean-Loup Chrétien, CNES cosmonaut, first european to go in space in 1982
- Jean-François Clervoy, ESA astronaut, CEO of Novespace,
- Léopold Eyharts, ESA astronaut and before from CNES
- Jean-Pierre Haigneré, ESA astronaut and before from CNES,
- Thomas Pesquet, ESA astronaut,
- Michel Tognini, ESA astronaut, Chief of the European Astronaut Center (EAC), at Cologne.

The event begun by a serie of questions/answers with the cosmonauts about the flight of Gagarin, a retrospection about the last 50 years and the possible ways of futur evolution for space exploration. A movie made by TV Roscosmos was showed on the screen and finally the intervention of Paolo Nespoli (Italian astronaut of the ESA) in direct from the International Space Station closed the event.

After that we were allowed to visit the exhibition with the cosmonauts like Serguey Zhukov.

Here are some pictures of the inauguration and the exhibition:

I wanted to publish a page about the Air and Space museum of Le Bourget for a long time, and here they are the pictures of the space lobby. This museum is the biggest French museum about space exploration, and it is a must see for people you wants to know more about the early French and European space exploration.

This museum is also dedicated to aviation and has some very nice objects like two Concordes and Bleriots.

For the visit of the space lobby it’s here.

Near the battlements of the Peter and Paul’s Fortress, of St Petersburg, is located a museum dedicated to the first works of the LenGIRD and then to the space exploration of the USSR. The museum is named after Valentin P. Glushko who was one of the firsts founder’s of the LenGIRD (Group for the Study of Reactive Motion) in 1931.

The visit begins here.

Here are pictures I took of the space department in the Polytechnical museum in Moscow.

The museum is really big and has many other departments (cars, aviation, energie, telecommunication, …), if you go in Moscow you should visit it.

Back from my little trip in Russia I publish pictures of the space museums I visited. Here, it’s the museum of aviation and cosmonautic which is located in Moscow not far from the former airport.

Other museum’s pictures will come.

Here begin the visit.

I had the occasion to visit, this summer, the Cosmonautic museum of Kaluga. This is the first museum about space exploration, it was built in 1967 under the decision of S.P. Korolev, even if it is a little bit old it is still an astonishing place because of its assortments and rockets.

The visit begins here.