India’s First Space Museum Lands in Kolkata - GetBengal Story
Aviation, rail, ships, currency, archaeology—Kolkata has museums dedicated to all of these. There are even multiple museums on science. The only thing missing was a space museum. That gap, too, has now been filled—not just for Kolkata, but for the entire country.
The museum has been built primarily to introduce students and young people to the world of space. These days, most students pursuing science and technology lean towards career-oriented studies. This career-centric mindset has increasingly become a barrier - not just for space science, but for far-reaching scientific inquiry and research in general. In this context, a well-curated museum like this will not only inspire students to pursue scientific exploration but also quench much of their curiosity about space.
In 1984, then Air Force Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma traveled into space aboard a Russian spacecraft. After spending seven days in orbit, he returned to Earth. It was he - the country’s first astronaut - who inaugurated this museum in 2023. The museum houses over 1,200 objects related to space. Among them are replicas of spacecraft, autographs of astronauts, accounts of what the first humans saw when they stepped onto the moon, and even items brought back from space.
The exhibits include a model of Apollo 11 (the spacecraft that carried Neil Armstrong and his team to the moon), complete with dolls representing the three astronauts. There’s also a model of the first airplane built by Orville and Wilbur Wright. Other displays feature memorabilia of Ram Chandra Chatterjee, the first Indian to ascend into the sky in a balloon, and Stephen Hector Taylor Smith, the Anglo-Indian rocket pioneer from Kolkata. Visitors can also see lunar and Martian soil, 3.7-billion-year-old fossils, a galaxy exhibition, and even a small planetarium.
India’s first space museum has been set up on the first floor of the newly constructed building of the Indian Centre for Space Physics (ICSP), located in Mukundapur on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass in Kolkata. Spanning nearly 7,500 square feet, the museum has been named the Museum for Astronomy and Space Science. The institute is led by Professor Sandip Chakrabarti.
Tickets to the museum are priced at ₹100. However, discounts are available for bulk bookings of more than 25 tickets. Schools have additional opportunities for organized visits. Tickets can be purchased both online and offline. The museum remains closed on Wednesdays.
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Translated by Krishnendu Mitra
To read the original Bengali article, click here.
