I'm pretty dogged about keeping my kids connected with the culture of their birth country, Russia. We plant and cook Russian food, read Russian stories and follow the occasional Russian celebrity. But sometimes, immersing yourself in Russian culture also means looking beyond the Earth, which is how we wound up at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum this weekend.

Yes, there is a lot of American aviation and space history in the museum. But if you are looking to help your kids understand some of Russia's technical and scientific milestones, there's no place else to be, not even in Russia.

The museum chronicles the many decades of the space race and the more recent years of collaboration on the International Space Station. In the museum's central gallery on the ground floor, there's a whole section called "Space Race". My kids got to stand at the base of some huge Soviet rockets and see the Soyuz and Merkur capsules they launched. There was a spacesuit designed for the Soviet's unsuccessful effort to follow the U.S. to the moon. The kids even got to see a replica of Sputnik I, which celebrated its 50th birthday not long ago. We took in one of the movies at the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater, Space Station 3D. It's a little bit dated, but there were a lot of good scenes showing U.S. and Russian astronauts working together.

The visit gave us a good opportunity talk about how Russia and the United States have been friends and rivals over the years. Our countries have a complicated relationship, and if I can explain some of it to my kids through astronauts and cosmonauts, so much the better. (If you need to bone up on your space race history, there's a good backgrounder on the museum's Web site, here; for background on the space station, try this NASA site.)

As it turned out, our visit was well timed. Russia put its space program back in the news last week: Roskosmos, Russia's space agency, announced that it was building three new modules for the space station and a new launch site in the Russian Far East. Russia still uses Baikonur, a launch site set up under the Soviet Union, but it is in Kazakhstan. The head of Roskosmos also released a few more details on a space vehicle called the Clipper, which will be Russia's answer to the U.S. Space Shuttle. Two Russian companies are now competing to build the craft, which Roskosmos said will carry two professional astronauts and four passengers.

Maybe some of our kids will be among them.

Image, credit: Sputnik I, Wikimedia Commons