by The famous Mercury capsule home and the spacecraft that brought the Apollo 13 crew back to Earth is getting an upgrade.
The Cosmosphere, a world-class space museum located in Hutchinson, Kansas, announced this week that it is ready to continue the redesign and renovation of its Space Hall, a series of galleries that allow visitors to step back through the history of exploration. space through an extensive collection of artefacts.
“We’ve done about a third of the museum, so starting with the V-2 Gallery, up through about 1961 and the Mercury-Atlas 1 capsule,” said Jim Remar, president and CEO of the Cosmosphere, in an interview with collectSPACE . com. “We’re going back in now and doing the last two thirds.”
The work, which is due to start this month and be completed before the end of the year, includes some of the Cosmosphere’s most popular exhibitions, including the Mollett Early Spaceflight Gallery which opened in 2005 and the Apollo Gallery, which an unrivaled range of moon landing memorabilia. Once done, the renovations will provide a new sense of continuity as you walk through the Hall’s chronological presentation.
“What we’re doing is creating a uniform look and feel,” Remar said. “We will have similar graphic treatments, similar sound channels and visuals. It will also open up a new brightness for the exhibitions, so it will offer the same continuous story to visitors, but do it in a more attractive way.”
Related: Facts about NASA’s Apollo program.
Designed at different points during the Cosmosphere’s own 60-year history, the galleries have had different aesthetics to date. The Apollo Gallery, for example, is unlit and sets its artefacts against a dark background, bringing out the darkness of space. In contrast, the Early Space Flight Gallery, the newest exhibit to open, uses blue and red lighting to separate the efforts of the United States and the former Soviet Union in the early years of the space race.
The new look of the hall, as already seen in the finished Gallery V-2 and in the rendering of the rooms to be redesigned soon, chooses a white and azure (or sky blue) background against a darker blue or gray floor. Black ceilings still nod to the relationship between the artefacts and the outside space.
“We’re also incorporating a bit more AV, as well as some interactivity into the gallery spaces,” Remar said.
Visitors will soon be able to step on a haptic plate to feel what happens when a rocket engine ignites and adjust the flow and aerodynamics around a vehicle while looking at the original model built just for the Mercury capsule.
“We will also have to [new] Replica command module mounted against the [Apollo-era] White Room to give visitors an understanding of the connection between the spacecraft and the entrance and how the astronauts entered the command module for the launch,” Remar told collectSPACE. “So a lot of fun and an opportunity for visitors to be really immersed in reality. great environment.”
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During the renovations, it is planned to keep as many of Cosmosphere’s iconic artefacts on public display as possible.
“It will be a rolling closure,” Remar said. “Obviously when people come here, they want to see [the Apollo 13 command module] ‘Odyssey,’ they want to see [Gus Grissom’s recovered Mercury capsule] ‘Liberty Bell 7,’ so we will try to keep those two iconic artifacts on display for as long as we can. Obviously there will be a period during some of the exhibition and construction when we will have to remove them from the exhibition, but the amount will be minimal.”
At the same time as the closures new exhibitions will be opening in the public areas outside the Cosmosphere Justice Planetarium and Dr Goddard’s Lab interactive theatre. Visitors will still be able to enjoy movies in the Carey Digital Dome Theater and participate in STEM activities in the CosmoKids area, as well as the shows in the planetarium and Dr. Goddard’s Lab.
“We are also upgrading the public spaces in front of Dr. Goddard’s Laboratory and the planetarium, we are taking care of some deferred maintenance and we are painting the outside of the facility and the rockets,” said Remar. “All told, we were able to raise about $4.7 million for the Space Hall renovation and these projects.”
In particular, funds were made available through federal appropriations spearheaded by Senator Jerry Moran, a SPRINT (State Park Revitalization and Investment in Specified Tourism) grant and most recently a significant grant from the Kansas City-based Sunderland Foundation.
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