Virginia’s Space History.
When Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon in 1969, he credited NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton. Langley’s engineers designed and tested the Apollo 11 spacecraft and built the space program’s first simulators, where Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin practiced complex landing maneuvers and trained in one-sixth of the Earth’s gravity.
Of Apollo: When We Went to the Moon, now open at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture (VMHC) in Richmond, museum president and CEO, Jamie Bosket says, “One of the most exciting parts of this new exhibition is the important Virginia history that is woven into the ever-evolving story of space exploration.”
Organized by the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Apollo covers the early space race through the International Space Station program, where NASA astronaut and Lynchburg native, Leland Melvin, served on two missions.
Visitors can touch a moon rock, leave “footprints” on a virtual lunar surface, experience the walk to the Apollo 11 launchpad, and climb aboard a full-scale model of an Apollo 17 lunar rover, through Dec. 31. VirginiaHistory.org
This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue.
