Armstrong Air & Space Museum

A baby faced Korean War Fighter Pilot

Every year we stop here in Wapakoneta for at least 5 days before heading to Michigan for the summer and every year we say that we are going to visit the Armstrong Space Museum which is right across the road from us. Well this year we finally did it, both of us have visited the museum before but it's been at least 30 years so we were due.

The museum starts with the first experiments in rocketry and goes through to the Shuttle, with a heavy concentration on Armstrong of course. Neil was born and raised right here in Wapakoneta, his first flight was in a Ford Tri motor with his dad when they skipped Sunday school to take the flight because it was cheaper Sunday mornings. He did his flight training and received his pilots license from the local (now gone) airport.

The Mercury Seven Astronauts.

They have a large number of original items from the space program on display, too many to mention here. We spent about 2 hours here and pretty much covered everything including a ten minute video in the main room. During the video they showed them being retrieved from the capsule after the lunar landing, they had to put on special contamination suits before settling on the deck of the aircraft carrier. Once on deck they walked straight to a containment vehicle were they would live for the next 25 days to make sure they didn't bring anything back from the moon, the interesting part here for Rvers is that the containment vehicle was a modified Air Stream trailer, which was made only ten miles from here in New Jackson,Ohio.

Neil Armstrong's Space suit that he wore while walking on the moon during the Apollo 11 Mission.

A special style Pepsi-Cola for drinking in outer space.

My favorite display.  These models are built to scale, if you look at the bottom right you will see a small white line I drew next to the Mercury Redstone rocket that was used by the Mercury Astronauts, right behind it is the Saturn V rocket used to take Armstrong to the moon.

Just a little bit of a difference in size.

Anybody that has followed the Space Program, from Sputnik and Echo right up to the present time will find this museum a worth while stop.