New Mexico Museum of Space History

State Museum Holding The International Space Hall Of Fame, In A Five Storey Gold Glass Cube On The Sacramento Foothills Above Alamogordo, With A Planetarium And An Outdoor Rocket Park · Alamogordo, New Mexico

The museum sits in a five-storey cube of gold reflective glass on the hillside above Alamogordo, which is visible from most of the Tularosa Basin and looks like nothing else in New Mexico. Inside it is the International Space Hall of Fame, a state institution that has been inducting figures from the whole history of spaceflight since 1976, and galleries that work down through the building from the view at the top. The local connection is real rather than invented: Robert Goddard did much of his rocket development at Roswell up the road, the first V-2 launches on American soil were made at White Sands below, and Ham the chimpanzee, who flew a Mercury capsule in 1961, is buried outside the front door. There is a planetarium, an outdoor rocket park with a good deal of hardware in it, and enough of a view over the white sands to justify the hillside location on its own. It works best as the indoor half of a day whose other half is spent on the dunes.

3198 State Route 2001, Alamogordo, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 88310, United States

Open most days through the middle of the day and afternoon, closing on some major holidays and occasionally on a weekday in low season. The planetarium runs shows on a published timetable through the day, ticketed separately or in a combined ticket, with evening astronomy programmes on announced dates. The outdoor rocket park is part of the same site and is exposed, so it is best walked early in summer.

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