Cosmosphere

The Cosmosphere sits at the corner of Plum Street and 11th Avenue in Hutchinson, Kansas, next to Hutchinson Community College. It began as a planetarium on the Kansas State Fairgrounds in 1962 and now fills a building of about 105,000 square feet. It was once called the Kansas Cosmosphere.

It holds more than 13,000 spaceflight artifacts, the largest combined collection of American and Russian pieces in the world. Its Russian holdings are the biggest outside Moscow, and its American holdings rank just behind the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. It is the only Smithsonian affiliate museum in Kansas.

Besides the exhibit halls, the site has the Justice Planetarium, the Carey Digital Dome Theater, a live rocketry-history show called Dr. Goddard's Lab and CosmoKids, a hands-on area for younger visitors.

The collection follows spaceflight from early rocketry in the World War II era through the Space Race and Cold War, then on to the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, SpaceShipOne and commercial flight. Among the flown pieces are the Apollo 13 command module Odyssey, the Gemini 10 capsule, the Liberty Bell 7 Mercury spacecraft and a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. A Moon rock from Apollo 11 is also on display.

The Russian side includes a flight-ready backup of Sputnik 1, a Vostok capsule and a Voskhod 2 capsule. Outside, a Mercury-Redstone and a Titan II stand upright beside the building. Everything on display is a flown artifact, a flight-ready backup, an engineering model or a historically accurate replica.

The museum's SpaceWorks division has restored flown American spacecraft for museums around the world, including Odyssey and Liberty Bell 7, which are both shown here. It also built roughly 80% of the artifacts and props used in the film Apollo 13.