The Museum of Aviation and Cosmonautics was opened in Chernivtsi in 1999, two years after Leonid Kadeniuk's space flight aboard the Space Shuttle-Columbia. The exposition of the Museum of Aviation and Cosmonautics consists of two permanent sections.
On the first floor of the museum there is an exposition that covers the history of aviation, from balloons of the Montgolfier brothers, gas-filled balloons of Professor Charles, the first airships to giant flying ships - airships of Count Zeppelin. You can learn about all this from more than 2,500 models, badges, postcards, photos and other documents. Aircraft models, which are exact copies of historical devices, show the whole path of development of aviation. In addition to models for inspection, units, spare parts, devices of real aircraft of different times are exhibited. Of particular interest are the 1928 Fokker propeller and the device that everyone used to call the Black Box.
The exposition on the second floor is dedicated to space research. Visitors can view presenting models of the first artificial satellites and rockets. Most of the exhibition is dedicated to the flight into space on the spacecraft "Vostok" on April 12, 1961, the first representative of mankind - Yuri HaHarin, the flights of astronauts G. Titov, A. Nikolaev, P. Popovych, V. Bykovskyi and the first woman astronaut - V. Tereshkova. The museum also collects a lot of material about US space programs, from suborbital flights to flights on orbiters "Space Shuttle". Expeditions to the Moon on Apollo spacecraft, a joint program of the USSR and the USA EPAS on Soyuz-Apollo spacecraft. These are stamps, postcards, badges, posters, photographs and scale models.
A significant part is occupied by the exposition, which is dedicated to the first cosmonaut pilot of independent Ukraine Leonid Kadeniuk. Among the unique exhibits - gifts from NSAU, NASA, astronauts, etc.
The exhibits of the museum were provided or made under the direction of the enthusiast of this business Valery Hrechnev, who collected materials for the museum for 45 years, as well as the modeler Vitaly Yatsenko. V. Hrechnev donated 1,700 models of airplanes and missiles, 1,400 postage stamps, 1,120 badges, 17,000 slides and photographs, and 1,340 videocassettes to the museum.
