RKK Energiya Museum

By 1961, mankind had become completely consumed with the idea of space flight. Yet so many of its grandest moments were already familiar.

The muted rumble of rocket engines firing. The otherworldly site of machinery easing off the ground. The arcing trail of fire across the sky, and the billowing plumes of smoke left where it once sat, back on Earth, back with us.

These were familiar sights and sounds even then, after dozens of test rockets, satellite launches, and other experiments of space flight. Some of which may or may not have even involved dogs and monkeys. Frankly, the world began to wonder what would come next, or perhaps whether anything ever would.

But on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin changed all that.

That's the day he climbed aboard one of those rockets and blasted into space, becoming the first man to travel into outer space and single-handedly recalibrate the world's expectations, permanently shifting our collective focus from examination to exploration. From the finite to the infinite. The dream had begun.

Of course, none of it was done single-handedly.

The rocket he boarded was called the Vostok 1, and after it came tumbling and spinning red-hot back to Earth, it eventually found itself back to the very place it was built: The RKK Energiya factory.

Now home to a museum of the same name that celebrates early Russian space flight, RKK Energiya was a key factor in the Russian space program, and it had hands in both the famed Sputnik satellite and Vostok 1.

The museum features several artifacts and exhibits based on Russian space flight, but the crown jewel is the capsule from the Vostok 1. Without that, Yuri would never have made it home, and even today it holds a powerful mystique over visitors who come to see a tiny room that went to space and back, not just at one time but for the first time.

And, like Yuri, that's something no one else can duplicate.