KALUGA, January 10. /ITAR-TASS/. The authorities of the city of Kaluga in central Russia on Friday announced the general contractor for the project to enlarge the local Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics. Under the project, it is planned to build the second stage of the museum that will more than double its attendance, the press centre of the Roslan construction group that will implement the project, told Itar-Tass.
The museum second stage construction project, the cost of which is estimated at 1.37 billion roubles, will be funded from the federal budget. It is planned to complete it in December 2016, on the eve of the museum’s 50th anniversary, the press centre said, noting that “the project will make it possible to more than double the museum’s capacity, increasing its attendance to 400 thousand visitors per year.”
Under the museum’s second stage construction project it is planned to put up a new building with an area of 12,500 square metres, exceeding the area of the existing museum’s building almost four times. The new building will make a uniform architectural ensemble with the current museum building and the Vostok rocket launch complex. The two buildings will be connected by an underground passage. The project provides for the construction of the modern 20.5-metre high three-floored glass and metal building on the riverbank line slope, to which end it is planned to make the upper, middle and lower terraces for it. The building’s frontispiece will have an open platform with a beautiful view of the Yachenka River water reservoir and Kaluga pine forest.
A solar observatory dome, a solar array site, roof lights for lighting upper level premises, as well as a well-furnished territory for the museum visitors and recreating city dwellers will be placed on the building’s roof.
The new building will have on display the exhibit items that are so far kept in the museum’s depositories. It will also have a 3D cinema theatre, an interactive theatre room, a scientific adventure complex “Cosmic Voyage” with simulated effects of space flight, an observatory, a hall of space simulators, as well as a “Cosmic Cafe” with the appropriate “space” menu.
The Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics in Kaluga is the world’s first and Russia’s largest space museum, created with the direct participation of Sergei Korolev (lead Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer) and the first man in space Yuri Gagarin. The museum was opened in 1967. The museum’s fund contains more than 60 thousand depository items, including some 40 thousand items in the main fund.