From carriage to rocket!
The 34th «Oldtimer Gallery», Russia’s largest exhibition of vintage cars and antiques, has opened at EXPOFORUM on April 12, Cosmonautics Day, not by chance! The theme of space runs like a red thread through the exposition of the past, filled with hundreds of amazing exhibits.
The Exhibition zest is the collection of mock-ups of spacecrafts that explored the Venus. The exhibits have been provided by the Moscow Museum of the Institute of Space Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The mock-up of the Mars Rover of the late 20th century is one of the smallest in size, but huge in its importance device, developed at the Research Institute «TRANSMZSH» to test the chassis and control system operation of the real rover. This machine has become the basis for designing mobile robots capable of working at places and mediums where human presence is impossible or dangerous. Ilya Sorokin, the organizer of the Exhibition «Oldtimer Gallery», is next to the rover. He knows this aircraft firsthand, because by education, he is an aircraft test engineer.
A significant part of the exposition is occupied by the 3rd section of the manned space station «Mir», which is residential, scientific and technological. «Mir» was intended for long-term space flights by crews of
2–3 cosmonauts, for the purpose of conducting technical, biomedical, geophysical and astrophysical experiments and research.
The module «Kvant» was launched into orbit on March 31, 1987, and on April 12, it docked to the station «Mir», for conducting various studies.
The automatic interplanetary station «Venera 4» designed to explore the Venus was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on June 12, 1967. Its flight lasted 128 days. As the result, data on density, temperature and chemical composition of the Venus atmosphere were obtained and transmitted to the Earth for the first time.
The spacecraft “Soyuz” is the name of a series of Soviet and Russian multi-seat spacecrafts for flights in low-Earth orbit. They have still been developed by the Corporation «Energia». In the USSR, from 1967 to 1981, 40 spacecrafts «Soyuz» were launched into orbit, including 2 unmanned ones.
Looking back, one can see the Exhibition “Court Carriage”, which takes the Exhibition visitor from the 20th to the 19th century. The phaeton of Aleksander I, Empress Maria Feodorovna’s sleigh and a 19th-century baby stroller from the State Museum-Reserve «Tsarskoye Selo» look as if they were built yesterday, and not in 1807–1821.
The reverent attitude towards the exhibits, some of which were literally revived from the ruins by connoisseurs of antiquity, is felt everywhere. Among dozens of rare museum exhibits to have been gathered from various parts of the country are concept cars and prototypes of automobiles and motorcycles from the 1980s and 1990s, film-actor cars from the Lenfilm Studio, the Museum of the Special Purpose Garage of the Federal Security Service of Russia, the restored «car of three centuries», retro agricultural machinery, among which the children’s favorite – the blue tractor from the Scientific and Technical Museum of Tractor History in Cheboksary.
The Exhibition is truly interactive: one can sit in the carriage driver’s cabin and «drive» a radio-controlled race car along the special track, shoot at the toy tankodrome, and spin a real trolleybus «steering wheel», visit the imperial carriage, ride a mini-tram and participate in a real retro rally – and all this without leaving the Exhibition hall!
Visit us at EXPOFORUM! On the event days, free shuttle buses run from Moskovskaya Metro Station to EXPOFORUM.