The Museum of Cosmonautics, or the Konstantin Tsiolkovsy State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics to give it its full name, is Kaluga's most famous sight. It was decided to build the museum in Kaluga upon the insistence of Sergey Korolev in recognition of the contribution of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in the Soviet Space Race. In 1961 Yuri Gagarin laid the building's cornerstone and the museum was officially opened in 1967. The museum has exhibitions on the history of aeronautics and cosmonautics and displays models of spacecraft and samples of moon rock. The museum also contains a working planetarium. Outside the museum there is a Vostok rocket-launcher which served as the back-up during Gagarin's first flight into space.

Opposite to the entrance of the museum a statue of a young Yuri Gagarin was unveiled in 2011 to mark the 50th anniversary of his historic flight.