Kansas Cosmosphere

Location:  Downtown Hutchinson at 11th and Plum Streets

Contact:  ph. 1-800-397-0330 or visit the website:  Kansas Cosmosphere

The Kansas Cosmosphere probably has some of the biggest and best yard art around!  This ornament is a Redstone rocket, of the same type which propelled the first American into space.

This SR-71 Blackbird greets visitors as they enter the Cosmosphere.  The building houses educational facilities, an IMAX theater, and a planetarium as well as a space museum.

The museum is excellent.  There are many rare and interesting exhibits.  Housed here are displays of the German V-1 and V-2 (pictured at right).  Produced near the end of WW2, these were truly wonder weapons.  They were decades ahead of anything the allies had at the time.  The V-2 display gives details of how the rockets were manufactured in underground factories by slave laborers.  The working conditions were unbelievably inhumane.  Two slave laborers died producing the V-2 for each person killed  by their use as a weapon.   A WW2 vet standing next to me at the display remarked, "This is what we were fighting against...".  Plans were on the drawing board to make an even more powerful rocket with several stages and the capabilities to reach as far as New York City.   The display also touches on the Nazi efforts to produce an atomic weapon.  One shudders to think about what might have been had the Nazis not been defeated when they were.

Also on display in the museum is the largest collection of space suits in the world.  It traces their development from early and primitive pressure suits to more modern and true "Space Suits" which protect the human body from the vacuum, heat and cold outside of our atmosphere.

The museum has a number of space capsules from both the American and Russian space programs.  At left is a photo of one of the Mercury capsules that were used to put the first Americans in space.  The photo on the right is of the actual Apollo 13 space craft in which three American Astronauts nearly perished after a malfunction in space while enroute to the moon.  It was a very close call and was dramatized in the Ron Howard movie Apollo 13.

The race to put a man on the surface of the moon was very much a part of the Cold War.  It was an effort to capture the "high ground" of space before the other side did.  With the collapse of the USSR and the reunification East and West Germany, the Berlin Wall, one of the most powerful symbols of the Cold War, came tumbling down.  Part of that wall is now on display in the museum.  You can walk up and touch this important part of history that  many East Germans shed their blood on trying to escape to the West.

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