Mass. Air and Space Museum finds a new home in Hyannis. Here's what to know.

During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci spent a lot of time dreaming about flight, and inventing ways to get humans aloft. More than 400 years later, in 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the first successful powered airplane, followed 58 years afterwards by the Freedom 7 mission that put the first American in orbit.

Air and space flight may be associated with places like Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the Johnson Space Center in Texas, but many of the accomplishments and technological advancements that have ensued since the Wright brothers first flew — and that have given wing to da Vinci's dream of human flight — can be claimed by Massachusetts.

That history is showcased at the Massachusetts Air and Space Museum, which is officially celebrating its relocation to downtown Hyannis with a ribbon cutting, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., on Friday, March 17.

The museum's first home was the plaza housing the state's last Kmart.

The museum first opened on Cape Cod in February 2020, in a space at the Capetown Plaza on Iyannough Road in Hyannis, but its operation was curtailed by the pandemic. It closed in March that year, then reopened in July and remained open until November 2021. That's when its lease at the plaza ran out, because of planned redevelopment of the strip mall that also hosted the state's last Kmart. The search was on for a new location.

That location is 438 Main St., Hyannis, a former furniture store that was most recently used by Sturgis Charter Public School.

More:Air and space museum to relaunch in spring on Main Street, Hyannis

After nearly a year of permitting and renovations at the new location, the museum had a soft reopening just four months ago, on Nov. 10. The visitor volume since, said Interim Executive Director Keith Young, has been "moderate," but that wasn't unexpected.

"It did work for us to be able to have a little bit of a slower opening. We literally just finished the renovations in the back part of the museum," Young said in a phone interview.

The new location, nearly directly across from the John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum, is expected to bring more foot traffic than the museum's previous home.

What is the Massachusetts Air and Space Museum all about?

The goal of the museum is simple: To showcase the state’s many important contributions to aviation, in both air and space flight and, as outlined in its mission statement, to inspire new generations "to explore, experience and pursue interest and opportunities in science and technology."

So how did the Massachusetts Air and Space Museum end up on Cape Cod in the first place?

"Way back when we were looking for a place, the airport commission at what is now Cape Cod Gateway Airport invited us to come down," Young explained. So the founders did. They liked what they saw, and stayed.

What are some of the museum's highlights and attractions?

"We have exhibits that outline Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry," Young said. "We have some information about the 1910 Harvard Boston aero meet, we have a cockpit from an F-106 interceptor, and the air crew training device that was at Otis Air base, we have a GE jet engine for a helicopter from General Electric in Lynn, and we have a display of Story Musgrave, who was an astronaut who oversaw the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope and was the only astronaut to have flown on all five space shuttles."

There is also a display on the David Clark Company of Worcester, a company that developed so-called G-suits for fighter pilots "so that when they're pulling extra Gs in maneuvers they prevent them from blacking out," said Young, in addition to the communications headsets used by astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission and all missions that followed.

And that's not all.

A replica space suit and flight simulators are at the Hyannis museum.

The museum has detailed model aircraft and many artifacts to view, like a replica of the Gemini space suit, also made by David Clark Company, as well as other exhibits highlighting Massachusetts-based accomplishments in the flight industry, from stunts to fly a glider off the Old North Church steeple in 1757 to the Chatham stopover of the first plane to make a transatlantic flight, and the Massachusetts manufacture of heat shields used on spacecraft from NASA's Mercury Project through the Apollo program and beyond — now for the Orion program that aims for a return to the moon and to send humans to Mars.

And then there are the notable pilots, like Michael Goulian, known for his aerial acrobatic maneuvers; Anne Bridge Baddour, a former experimental research pilot for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and aerospace pioneer Ruth Bancroft Law, who showed women could be just as capable of piloting airplanes as men, and in 1916 flew from Chicago to New York, breaking the existing record for the longest nonstop flight in the U.S.

Beyond all of that, there are hands-on experiences to be had at the museum, too.

"We have two sit-down flight simulators and a remote control airplane flight simulator," said Young. "We talk about how airplanes fly and some of the principles of flight."

Among the items the museum does not have are actual, life-sized aircraft.

Toward that end, the museum is studying the idea of renovating an unused hangar at Cape Cod Gateway to display aircraft. The dream would be to connect the two locations via a bus, and to partner with a flight school, an air tour operator and more.

Museum hours and admission price

The museum is open at 438 Main St. in Hyannis. The hours are from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. To learn more visit https://www.massairspace.org/ or https://www.facebook.com/MassachusettsAirSpaceMuseum/.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Mass. Air and Space Museum open on Hyannis Main Street. What's inside?