London’s Science Museum has boldly gone where no science museum has gone before. In Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age it has created a dazzling, unprecedented exhibition devoted to the Russian space program. To do so, the museum has borrowed a cornucopia of treasures from no fewer than 18 different institutions. Many of the objects on show have never been seen outside Russia. Some even had to be declassified to be to be brought to London. Science museum director Ian Blatchford has described it as “unique and unrepeatable”. He is not exaggerating.
The exhibition explores uncharted territory, as fascinating and unfamiliar as any alien world. On show are not just the outlandish technologies that the Russians flung into orbit – and to the moon, and to the planets – but also the vision and the political ambition that fuelled their national space adventure.
Make no mistake, this is a big exhibition. It is big in scope, tracing the origins of the Russian space program from the imagination of the visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose ideas inspired a space program that he did not live to see, through to present day excursions to the International Space Station.
Nor does it want for scale. The cavernous rooms at the Science Museum might still be too small to accommodate an entire rocket but the exhibition is nevertheless infused with the gigantism of rocketry. A huge RD-107 rocket engine towers over visitors at the entrance to the exhibition. You have no choice but to look up. Eventually your gaze will be torn away by the other large objects on display – the gleaming cone of Sputnik 3; the leathery sphere of Vostok 6 that carried Valentina Tereshkova, the first female cosmonaut, into space and back to earth; and the astonishing metal spider that is the LK-3 lunar lander.
The exhibition delighted this space junkie. Born in the sixties, the excitement of the Apollo programme captured my childish heart and planted a fascination with our exploration of space that thrives to this day. I have visited Cosmonauts twice now, and I’m seriously thinking of going back. To the unsympathetic eye the bizarre array of capsules, satellites and instruments on display, many disfigured by ugly, perplexing bulges or sprouting strange appendages, some scorched or damaged by impact, might seem like just so much junk. I claim no particular expertise but for me here is physical evidence of the can-do and make-do spirit that has infused space programs all over the world, and is reinforced by stories I have heard of the courage and audacity of cosmonauts and astronauts.
Some of the objects on show are well known. There is a Soyuz capsule similar to the one that had a starring role in the movie Gravity, and who on Earth would not recognise the shiny globe that was Sputnik I? But many are completely new to Western senses, and even some of the familiar objects spring fresh surprises when seen close up. The Voshkod 1 capsule, the first to carry three cosmonauts, was the same size as Tereshkova’s; but to accommodate them the seats were rotated by ninety degrees which made it harder to see and access the instrument panels, bolted to the bulkhead. This was a race and in the 1960s there was no time for re-design. I was surprised also to see embedded within those panels a rotating globe which told the cosmonauts their position over the surface of the earth – a feature that survived at least into the 1990s.
On a more human level there is the paraphernalia of everyday life in space – the dining table, the freezer, the toilet – all re-designed for the weightlessness of orbit, and an array of space suits and other accoutrements for survival in that hostile zone. The exhibition is also enriched by the films and posters of propaganda that propelled the Russians into space in the 50s and 60s – and the banners and souvenirs that commemorated their achievements. If you want to touch the hem of Yuri Gagarin’s garment, you can – almost: his uniform is on display.
The majestic, globular lunar lander with its baleful cyclops eye is the most poignant and unexpected object in the Cosmonauts exhibition. I had not known of its existence. It never got to the moon because development of the giant rocket booster needed to launch its lunar mission stalled following the untimely death of Chief Designer Korolev in 1966. Even if it had succeeded, the touch-down would have been a lonely one. The lander could only accommodate a single cosmonaut (Alexey Leonov, the first space walker, had been selected to be Russia’s first man on the moon) and so he would have been unable to share the experience with a fellow traveller. For all the mythic derring-do of the lone hero, we humans remain quintessentially social animals. I should know. I’ve never been to space and have no prospect of going, yet I am still desperately keen to somehow grasp the experience.
The Russian lunar lander also marked the end of Russian dominance in space, at least in the 1960s. Although they had taken an early lead as the early American program stuttered and stumbled – the Russian rocket engines were more reliable (the RD-180, descendent of the RD-107, is used in US rockets today) – history records that it was the Americans who landed the first men on the moon.
Armstrong’s famous declaration as he stepped onto the surface of our lifeless satellite appears in the exhibition, nicely done using a 60s-style TV playing grainy footage of the Apollo 11 mission. It is footage we have all seen and heard a thousand times. I can’t speak for a younger generation, but to mine it seems as if we have seen and heard everything there is to know about the Apollo program.
Which is why the Project Apollo Archive, recently uploaded to the photo-sharing site Flickr, came as such a delightful surprise. The project is the work of Kipp Teague, who with the help of fellow enthusiasts and Nasa, has uploaded over 14,000 high-resolution photographs from the Apollo mission.
I stumbled upon this collection last month and it was like opening a dusty drawer and coming across envelopes stuffed with long-forgotten holiday snaps. There are just so many. Perversely, what makes the collection particularly delightful is that, as is often the case with holiday photos, many of the pictures are not that great. They are out of focus or badly composed, some evidently taken in the excitement of the moment. But this gives the collection an immediacy that has somehow faded from the few images that have become famous.
Here is the Apollo 11 LEM, ridiculously upside down on its way to the moon, the window frame blurred in the foreground.
Look – you can see Buzz Aldrin gazing out at the lunar surface on which he and Armstrong have just landed, with 10 seconds of fuel remaining. Is it blurry because Armstrong’s hands are still shaking?
And here is a man at work in the strangest of environments.
I have to confess: I looked through every single picture. And what surprised me is that there are no pictures that capture two astronauts together on the moon. Seven missions and no-one thought to send a tripod and a camera with a self-timer?
What is more, no attempt seems to have been made to take a picture of a man on the moon with his face visible. In almost every shot, the astronauts are anonymised – and partially dehumanised – by their reflective visors, as in Aldrin’s pose in one of the most iconic shots of the Apollo 11 mission. Having gone to all the trouble of putting men on the moon, why not take a photograph that shows their humanity?
So I searched again – I looked hard – and in fact there are one or two photographs that do reveal the face of a man, a man on the moon. As far as I can tell, they were captured by accident. It happened when the sunlight angled from the side, allowing the astronaut’s face to be glimpsed. The photos are so rare among the 14,000 that I guess the astronauts themselves may not often have noticed each others faces – though that seems a preposterous notion.
Here is one of the best, from Apollo 17. Gene Cernan – or is it Harrison Schmitt? – leans over the lunar rover…
…while later his colleague (without a chest-mounted camera) shares a moment with the American flag.
Here Aldrin, the shadow of his eyes and nose visible behind his visor, manoeuvres an experiment into place.
In black and white, Jim Irwin or Dave Scott of Apollo 15, works an instrument into the lunar soil, his profile just discernible.
There is one other grainy picture, from Apollo 17, that shows a face but that’s it. Five was all I could find. Why so few?
Mulling this over I also thought to check the internet for other finds and, of course, someone has been there before me. Several years ago Apollo historian Andrew Chaikin spotted film footage of Neil Armstrong containing frames that clearly show his face. I realised that I had read Chaikin’s account of the Apollo missions – A Man on the Moon – more than 10 years ago. Pulling my worn paperback from the shelf I found within it a photograph of Harrison Schmitt on the lunar surface, his face clearly lit. I have no idea why this picture did not strike me as meaningful at the time.
But I am struck now. It’s not just by the faces, but also the magnificent abundance of images in this collection. The Apollo astronauts and their missions have been reanimated in my mind. And thanks to the Science Museum, Russia’s cosmonauts have come alive for me too, as never before. I am all amazement.
So please, go and check out the Apollo Collection for yourself. And if you are within reach of London, go to the Cosmonauts exhibition. You’ll see things you wouldn’t believe.
Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age runs until 13 March 2016. @Stephen_Curry wishes he were an astronaut or a cosmonaut but is a professor of structural biology at Imperial College.
