October 6, 2025
A space-exploration museum like no other: oh my Gagarin!
Hi folks!
Since my tales from the Altai side are many and lengthy, today – an interlude in-between two of them for a breath of fresh air. Not that you can get air (or river water) fresher than that in Altai, but, I digress…
And so, just the other day, I finally managed to visit the RKK Energiya Museum in the town small city of Korolyóv (often spelled Korolev) just outside Moscow. The museum is dedicated to both the company’s own story and the history of the Soviet and Russian rocket-and-space industry as a whole. My impressions? Absolutely amazing! And with all due respect to the Museum of Cosmonautics, this place is better!
This is the very spot where all these technologies were invented and assembled, and – for those that returned from space – brought back to again. That’s what makes this place truly unique: the spacecraft you see here were typically produced in just two or three identical “copies”. One would fly into space, while the others stayed on Earth. So even if these specific pieces never made it to orbit, everything here is original – not mock-ups.
