The Anderson Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum is named after the balloonists Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, and Larry Newman, who made the first transatlantic balloon crossing in 1978 departing from Albuquerque. The museum sits on the edge of Balloon Fiesta Park, where the October festival takes over the city for two weeks and fills the sky with hundreds of balloons at dawn.
Outside of October, the museum itself covers balloon history from the Montgolfier brothers to modern records, with gondolas, envelopes, and equipment on display and good interactive exhibits on the physics of flight. The park around it is open year-round and gives a sense of the scale of the fiesta grounds. If you're planning to come for the Balloon Fiesta itself (typically the first two weekends of October), book hotels months in advance — the city fills completely.