The permanent exhibition on the first decade of the space age: Sputnik 1, the Gagarin flight and the first human spacewalk.
The exhibition opens with an exact replica of Sputnik 1 — a polished sphere 58 centimetres in diameter whose signal was heard around the world on 4 October 1957. Next to it stands the descent module of the Vostok spacecraft and the ejection seat in which Yuri Gagarin left the capsule at an altitude of seven kilometres.
The central section is devoted to Voskhod 2 and the first human spacewalk on 18 March 1965. Visitors see the original Berkut spacesuit and a cutaway of the Volga airlock, while the Globus IMP navigation instrument shows how cosmonauts fixed their position above the Earth without computers.
The route ends with an RD-107 engine — the eight-chamber first-stage powerplant of the R-7 rocket, without which none of these flights would have taken place. Launch footage from Baikonur, drawn from the museum archive, is screened nearby.
