Few who watched the triumphant return of the Apollo 11 crew from the first trip to the moon can forget the scene of President Nixon standing outside the quarantine chamber to congratulate the crew. The Airstream van fitted for Neil Armstrong and his crew is in the main hall. Skylab, America's first space station, orbited the Earth from 1973 to 1979. It was home to four missions before re-entering the Earth's atmosphere over Australia. The largest fragment to survive, a fibrous oxygen tank, stands in the museum near a model of the craft.
Special exhibits are also a popular item.
One of those exhibits arrived for a nine-month stay in December of 1990. Many of the spacecraft in the exhibit were actual back-up hardware that could have flown in space with minor modifications. The Centrifuge takes 46 passengers on an astronaut training session while experiencing triple the normal pull of gravity. Passengers feel the pressure build while watching the solar system and planets pass overhead on a planetarium dome. The centrifugal spin in the rotating theater provides the extra gravitational pull.