Museum of Space Exploration

When traveling through the outskirts of Kyiv, one expects to find small villages, farms and the rolling countryside of Ukraine. What most do not expect is to find an old church that is now a museum filled to the brim with Soviet space items. Nevertheless, this is exactly what you will find here. 

The museum was opened in 1979 by Mikhail Sikorsk in collaboration with the academy of sciences. The museum started as a passion project of sorts, with the people involved talking to various Soviet and post-Soviet authorities to obtain items and other material for the museum. 

They were successful as now they have over 450 exhibits, all on display in five large rooms of the church. The exhibition is focused on the history of space exploration and shows various items that were really used for the programs, some of which have been in space. When visiting you can expect to find models of various spacecraft, parts of space ships, reconstructions of satellites like Sputnik,  a  rocket engine, and the spacesuit of Yuri Gagarin. It is also the home of the first Foucault pendulum in Ukraine.

The museum also shows the modern part of space exploration and focuses on the achievements of the Ukrainian space industry. 

When it first opened, the museum was known as the Museum of World Science and Peaceful Space Exploration. It was renamed in 2003. It is housed in the 1891 Church of St. Paraskeva, a national monument that was transferred to its current location in the 1970s.