Designated as the Edison Home National Historic Site on December 6, 1955, this location is now called Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

The park features two main buildings: the Laboratory complex featuring numerous inventions, films, and artifacts from Edison's inventing years there (starting in 1886), and the Glenmont Estate where Edison lived with his wife until he died in 1931.

At this location, Edison worked on making his original phonograph commercially viable, developed the kinetoscope and several other motion picture devices, and developed nickel-iron-alkaline storage batteries that powered early electric vehicles.

Also located at the park is Edison's Black Maria, one of the first motion picture studios.

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During the Cold War, numerous missile silos were created throughout North America and the Soviet Union. The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site is a preserved example of the operational missile sites, with nukes!

The sites were constructed in 1961. Part of the 44th Missile Wing, the D-01 and D-09 ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) silos were commissioned to deter a Soviet nuclear attack by ensuring mutual assured destruction (MAD).

Today, the facilities are a Cold War museum, and also represent the only remaining intact components of a nuclear missile field that once consisted of 150 Minuteman II missiles, 15 launch control centers, and covered over 13,500 square miles (35,000 km2) of southwestern South Dakota. The silos were decommissioned by the signing of the START treaty in 1991, and designated a national park in 1999.

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On October 4, 1957, the USSR kicked off the space race with the launch of the first satellite, the adorable Sputnik (aptly, Russian for "satellite").

The People's sphere was 22 inches (56 cm) in diameter, weighed 184 pounds (83 kg), and circled the Earth once every 96 minutes at 18,000 mph (29,000 kph). This little ball of Soviet sunshine transmitted a radio signal as its orbit fluctuated between 143 and 584 miles (230-940 km) above the earth. It continued to do so until its orbit degraded and burnt up in the proletariat flames of the atmosphere in January of 1958.

Located in the desert steppe of Kazakhstan, this facility was known as the Tyuratam launch base in the 50s (named after the nearby rail station). These days, the facility is rented from the Kazakhstan government by the Russians and is known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

All manned Russian spaceflights are currently launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

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Located high in the mountains of the Atacama Desert of northern Chile (one of the most arid regions in the world), the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory is an array of telescopes and scientific instruments that was founded in 1963 by Chileans and Americans.

Most recently, a phone box-sized Dark Energy Camera (or DECam) has been mounted on the 4m Victor M. Blanco telescope. The purpose of the 570-million-pixel camera is to scan some 300 million galaxies in the coming five years for evidence of dark energy.

The camera is comprised of 62 separate CCDs, the same kind of detector in consumer cameras. By doing some fancy stuff with a computer model and measuring red-shifting of an expanding galaxy paired with echoes of the Big Bang, the DECam should help to isolate and quantify dark energy. Simple as that...

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The Alcor Life Extension Foundation is the largest cryonics organization in the world today. With 12 full-time employees, Alcor has 975 members with 112 members currently in a state of cryopreservation, with 76 of those members in a state of brain preservation, preserved perpetually by liquid nitrogen.

This is where the head of baseball player Ted Williams is preserved.

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