The building of the former auto shop at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute (KPI) houses the Section of Astronautics History of the State Polytechnic Museum celebrating the many famous people and events with which space exploration is associated. The exposition shows general astronautics history from olden days to present time. Stands feature pioneers in astronautic theory, namely Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Friedrich Tsander, Yuri Коndratyuk and others, represent the Moscow Rocket Movement Study Group, as well as the Leningrad gas-dynamic laboratory and its ideologists - Sergey Korolyov and Valentin Glushko.
The exposition shows initial steps in astronautic practice from the launch of rockets from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome to the launch of the Earth's first artificial satellite and the first manned spaceflight.
A separate section is dedicated to the exploration of the Moon and other planets of a solar system. The stands showcase flights of probes to the Moon, photography of the dark side of the Moon, automatic extraction of Moon rocks and their delivery to the Earth.
One of the themes of the exposition is dedicated to the U.S. lunar program, which accomplished landing astronauts on the Moon. Visitors can see photos of astronauts on the Moon and the pattern of their flight. Mathematically substantiated calculations done by Yuri Kondratyuk during his studies at the Second Poltava Gymnasium were used for drawing up this program.
International space programs included flights of Soyuz craft to the orbital stations Salyut, Mir and the International Space Station, joint flight of the Soyuz and U.S. Apollo craft, the international program Vega to explore Venus and Halley's Comet.
Samples of space-rocket hardware are among exhibits of the Museum. Visitors can see one of the few samples of the state-of-the-art booster of the long-range ballistic missile R-12 kept in Ukrainian museums. Its mass production was organized at the engineering plant Yuzhmash in Dnepropetrovsk. Mikhail Yangel and Valentin Glushko were chief designers of the missile and the booster respectively. In 1962 R-12 missiles were shipped to Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. Although the missile and the booster went out of production in the 1970s, R-12 has become the prototype for Kosmos booster rockets designed to orbit Earth's artificial satellites. The exhibit highlights a certain stage of development of Soviet and Ukrainian rocket technology of the 20th century.
The space capsule of the Voskhod multiseater craft is the only exhibit there among Ukraine's museums. It had been operating in near-earth orbit under the name Kosmos-59 from March 7 to March 15, 1965 before the spacewalk performed by Soviet cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov in the same year. The mission of Kosmos-59 was to measure Earth's radiation belts, solar activity, X-ray radiation, effects of these factors on a living organism, as well as to photograph the sun's corona and the surface of the Earth in the interests of national economy and defense of a country. Its design is similar to the first manned spacecraft of the Vostok and Voskhod series.
The first Ukrainian nanosatellite of the CubeSat class of KPI make is exhibited near the Voskhod space capsule. Its development started in 2009. Blasted off from the Yasny launch base in Russia's Orenburg Oblast on June 19, 2013, the Dnepr booster vehicle put the nanosatellite into orbit at an altitude of 650-710 kilometers where it continues operating.
Development of the nanosatellite envisaged the following main tasks: training of highly skilled specialists for the space-rocket industry on the basis of modern components; the creation of a small unified platform to explore space, testing of new engineering developments and technologies; reception and processing of satellite information, development of the ground testing infrastructure at KPI to explore space; experimentation in space with solar batteries developed at KPI; research in the impact of space on operation of electronic subsystems of a satellite; and research on operation of GPS systems.
The Museum boasts the life-size model of the Earth's first artificial satellite 58 centimeters in diameter, weighing 83.6 kilograms. By launching the first artificial satellite Sputnik-1 on October 4, 1957, the U.S.S.R. initiated the Soviet program Sputnik under the guidance of Sergey Korolyov. This initiative also triggered the race between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. to conquer space. Measurements of orbital deflection of Sputnik-1 helped determine density of the upper atmosphere. In addition, the satellite helped explore propagation of radio signals in the ionosphere. The body of the satellite was filled with compressed nitrogen that enabled to detect meteoroids as their penetration from outside would tell on temperature data sent to the Earth. Because the unexpected success of the Soviet spacecraft stirred up the Sputnik crisis in the United States and kindled the space race, political ambitions overweighed heavily scientific importance of Sputnik-1.
A set of the exhibits, which both Ukrainian and Russian museums do not have but KPI, include starry sky simulators and the desk of an operator of space communication. The complex was used for mastering cosmonauts' skills in orienting a craft in space, coping with nominal and off-nominal situations during docking, flight and undocking of a spaceship, as well as in operating the landing system in a manual mode. In particular, it was used in the Cosmonauts Training Center named for Yuri Gagarin in the town of Zvezdny within the training complex of the Soyuz spaceship. Simulation of northern and southern hemispheres of the Earth's starry sky is a special feature of the design of this complex.
Among other Ukrainian museums, KPI has kept the only sample of the technological duplicate of the descent vehicle of space probe Venera 4 that was used for ground bench tests of onboard equipment. Launched on June 12, 1967, the original probe Venera 4 covered a distance of 350 million kilometers over the course of nine months and successfully went into Venus' orbit wherefrom it entered the Venusian atmosphere and made a soft landing on the surface of the planet for the first time in astronautics history. And for the first time, it sent the data back to Earth, which included chemical composition, atmospheric density, temperature and pressure on the surface of Venus. The descent vehicle weighs 383 kilograms.
Cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov presented the Museum with the control knob during his visit to KPI. The control knob was fixed on the spaceship Voskhod-2 that carried out a mission in March 1965. Its crew consisted of cosmonauts Aleksey Leonov, who became the first person to perform a spacewalk, and Pavel Belyaev. Using this knob, Pavel Belyaev manually directed the ship towards the landing zone.
Glider Junior is the only real model built at the Kiev aircraft factory at the end of the 1980s as a prototype of the single seat glider А-1 designed by Оleg Аntonov in 1935. It served as a sample to organize mass production of gliders designed for initial training in junior gliding schools. In 1989 the glider made trial flights at the Chaika airfield near Kiev.
KPI scientists and engineers made a great contribution to the space program, particularly the Vibrocenter program of vibration testing of the Buran space shuttle, development of heat insulation tiling for spacecraft, etc. Creating space-rocket hardware and orientation instruments, KPI graduates worked at almost all leading space industry enterprises including the Dnepropetrovsk space-rocket center, the Kiev central design office of research and production association Аrsenal, production association Коmmunar, and the company Khartron based in the city of Kharkov.
The nanosatellite PolyITAN-2-SAU developed by a team of scientists, professors and students of Igor Sikorsky KPI was put into near-Earth orbit on May 26, 2017 at 6 a.m. Kiev time. Carrying the nanosatellite built by KPI specialists, together with 27 other CubeSats made at universities from 19 countries, in two specialized containers, the resupply spacecraft Cygnus CRS OA-7 aboard the Atlas V booster rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral, U.S.A., on April 18, 2017. Cygnus CRS OA-7 was docked with the International Space Station on April 22. And so, a launching group of 18 university CubeSats including PolyITAN-2-SAU was delivered to its designated orbital position during the early hours of May 26.
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