The Cosmosphere

By Jordan Penner

Want to relive your pre-pubescent boyhood for an afternoon? Go back to a time when rocket engines, walking on the moon, and a fascination with supersonic flight took up more of your thoughts than girls? The Cosmosphere air and space museum in Hutchinson can do just that.

The Cosmosphere is a veritable jubilee of air and space artifacts, historical tidbits, and just downright cool things. Principal on the long list of cool things is the SR-71 Blackbird-that’s right, still one of the highest flying, fastest, and most awesome planes ever built- that greets you when you first walk in. This plane is not a model either; it’s one of the 29 ever built.

The rest of the museum takes you tastefully through the history of Soviet and American space exploration, reveling more in the wonders of human achievement than the dirty Cold War background that drove military budgets and fear through the roof. Though some texts depict America as the lone savior of the world from communism, the Russian space achievements are given just as much credence as the American- remember it’s cool stuff that matters more here, not beliefs and ideology. For that matter, the artifacts from Nazi Germany air program are very interesting.

If you let it, the Cosmosphere will not only take you back to a time when the space program was politically relevant, but also to a time when you could care less what that meant, and probably couldn’t care more about little things such as the fact that the Blackbird flew across the United States in 68 minutes or that it expands 1-2 feet in flight and leaks fuel while on the ground or that the first animal in space was Russian dog named Laika.