The home of a famously sunken Mercury capsule and the spacecraft that brought the Apollo 13 crew back to Earth is getting an upgrade.
The Cosmosphere, a world-class space museum located in Hutchinson, Kansas, announced this week that it is ready to continue with the redesign and renovation of its Hall of Space, a series of galleries that together allows visitors to step back through the history of space exploration by way of an extensive artifact collection.
"We have done about a third of the museum, so starting with the V-2 Gallery, up through about 1961 and the Mercury-Atlas 1 capsule," Jim Remar, president and CEO of the Cosmosphere, said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. "We are now going back in and doing the final two thirds."
The work, which is set to get underway this month and be completed before the end of the year, encompasses some of the Cosmosphere's most popular exhibits, including the Mollett Early Spaceflight Gallery that opened in 2005 and the Apollo Gallery, with its unrivaled array of moon landing memorabilia. When done, the renovations will deliver a new sense of continuity when walking through the Hall's chronological presentations.
"What we're doing is creating a uniform look and feel," said Remar. "We're going to have similar graphic treatments, similar wayfinding audio and visuals. It will also open up a new brightness to the displays, so it will provide visitors with the same continuous story, but just do it in a more engaging way."
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