Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age, Science Museum, review

Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age, Science Museum, review:

Poster celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s mission on 12 April 1961, on show at 'Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age'

Valentina Tereshkova was 26 when she became the first woman to be launched into space, in
1963. A former textile worker and amateur parachutist from the village of Maslennikovo, north east of Moscow, she told her mother she had been preparing for a parachuting championship.

It was a half-truth, necessitated by the security blackout surrounding her mission. But she had been training for the parachute jump of her life, one that would begin almost five miles above Kazakhstan, when she was ejected from the Vostok-6 capsule in which she'd spent three agonisingly uncomfortable days hurtling the earth’s orbit, observing, measuring, and recording her body’s responses.

The remains of this capsule - its surface scratched and charred by re-entry, the ejection rails just visible inside the open hatch, the control panel untouched since Tereshkova engineered her brave descent - is just one object in an extraordinary collection now on show at the Science Museum.

Cosmonauts, named after the Russian appellation for a navigator of the cosmos (the Americans opted for astronaut, navigator of the stars) is a marvel: an exceptional and unprecedented collection of models, drawings, footage and equipment relating to Russia’s singular passion for space travel.

All bar one of the 150-odd pieces come from private hands and have never been on public view. Most Russians will never have never seen Tereshkova’s capsule, for example, or the blue ventilation garment she wore under her spacesuit, painstakingly embroidered with a white dove and the letters CCCP. 

It seems incredible that these pieces, which will remain significant for as long as humans are alive, are only now being given the scrutiny they deserve. For many of us, the space race means Neil Armstrong’s step for mankind or the famous Earthrise photo, but these moments, which are deeply embedded in the collective consciousness, came from the West rather than the East.

We have forgotten that Russia led the way, and that Russia was first, and first many times. First satellite in space (1957), first animal in orbit (1957), first man in space (1961), first spacewalk (1965), first on Mars and Venus (both 1970s). America might have been only weeks behind, but behind they stayed.

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, stands in front of Vostok-6, the capsule she piloted CREDIT: NICK ANSELL

Cosmos fever was well-rooted in Russia. The revolutionary years and the ensuing drive to improve society fuelled a longing for cosmic utopia. One of the many joys of the exhibition is its devotion to those who dreamt about space travel long before it became a reality. Drawings by Georgy Krutikov executed in 1928 reveal flying cities and capsules bearing an uncanny resemblance to today’s space stations.

Aside from the legion of Sputnik satellites, Luna lander and Soyuz spacecraft, displayed so their shadows loom thrillingly large on the wall, are examples of how cosmic travel infiltrated everyday lives – a sputnik-shaped samovar, a 1959 letter from a farm worker begging she be sent on Sputnik, even the number plate for the Rolls Royce that drove Yuri Gagarin around England in 1961, after he became the first human in space.

Gagarin’s presence pulses lightly over every room, just as something of him – a Japanese Gagarin doll, for example - is still taken on every flight into space from Russian soil as a protective talisman. His military uniform, presented to suggest the tiny, 5ft 2’ body which once stood inside, is particularly resonant.

The final rooms are dedicated to how we survive in space, and show space travel for what it really is, a colossal exercise in engineering and design. This is, after all, what the space race came down to – resources, organisation and political will. But somehow the impression I left with was of none of these things, and, rather, how lionhearted the individuals who took humankind on this journey really were.