The Air Capital, the world's second-largest space collection, and the last tallgrass prairie
Three Kansas destinations chained from south to northeast. KICT Wichita is the Air Capital of the World — Beechcraft, Cessna, Stearman, Boeing, Spirit AeroSystems, and Learjet all built airplanes here, and roughly 70% of all general aviation aircraft ever built came out of this city. North to KHUT Hutchinson for the Cosmosphere: the largest combined collection of U.S. and Soviet spaceflight artifacts on Earth — Liberty Bell 7 (recovered from the Atlantic floor), Gemini X, the Apollo 13 command module Odyssey, plus a flown Soviet Vostok capsule. Two full-scale rockets stand vertical outside the building. Continue northeast 75nm to KMHK Manhattan: Kansas State University is here, but the destination is the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve at Strong City, fifty nautical miles southwest — 10,894 acres of unplowed tallgrass, the largest such tract left in the U.S., where bison were reintroduced in 2009 and big bluestem grows 8 feet tall by late August.