Armstrong Air and Space Museum

Three years to the day after Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, this museum, which Ohio Governor James Rhodes proposed, opened on July twentieth, nineteen seventy-two, to honor Armstrong and every Ohioan who had ever tried to defy gravity. Inside, you can stand beside the actual Gemini Eight capsule that Armstrong piloted in March of nineteen sixty-six, when he and David Scott completed the world's first docking of two spacecraft in orbit. The museum holds two of Armstrong's spacesuits, a Moon rock from Apollo Eleven, and an F Five D Skylancer jet from his test-pilot days.

An astro-theater dome shows space documentaries overhead. Armstrong, a notoriously private man, lived out his later years in the Cincinnati area and rarely returned to the spotlight, but the museum in his hometown remains the most personal account of his extraordinary life.