The Science Museum has lift-off with this spectacular show about the Soviet Union’s achievements in space, writes Oliver Green.
The Cosmonauts exhibition is both revelatory and revolutionary for the Science Museum. It is a revelation because it displays for the first time an astonishing collection of space artefacts that has never been seen outside Russia and gives us a new perspective on the space race of the 1950s and 1960s.
And it is a revolution because it is the first major loan exhibition of this kind that our national museum of science and industry has mounted, and is the closest it has come to the blockbusters we now expect from the British Museum, Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Ian Blatchford, the director of the Science Museum, says that it took five years of research, planning and negotiation, and involved more than 200 curators, scientists and space experts to develop the exhibition. “We’ve never been mad enough to put on anything on this scale,” he said at the opening.
With the delicate state of our diplomatic relationship with Russia, it is surprising that the project came to fruition at all, but the result is a spectacular success.
Cosmonauts is tactfully subtitled Birth of the Space Age, distinguishing it from the linked BBC television programme of the same name, which has the tagline How Russia Won the Space Race.
The exhibition and the film do the same thing: dramatically rebalance our knowledge and assumptions about recent history by leaving the US side of the story out of the picture for once and revealing a great deal that we (and the Russian people) have never been able to see and talk about before.
Even now, years after the end of the original space race in the 1970s, it is a sobering thought that an exhibition such as this would probably not be possible in Russia or the US. The old ideological propaganda narratives of Nasa and the Soviet Union are still too strongly embedded in the national psyches of both countries.
This makes the Science Museum’s achievement all the more extraordinary. It has only been possible through the unprecedented cooperation of key individuals and agencies in Britain and Russia, which made this the final outcome of the 2014 Russia-UK Year of Culture, something you may have blinked and missed.
As Blatchford explains in his foreword to the superb book that accompanies the exhibition, the exploration of the cosmos has long been a feature of Russian thinking and was developed through art, literature, film and architectural design long before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first spacecraft, in 1957.
The exhibition begins with some imaginative concepts and sketches by Russian artists, architects and theorists of the 1920s, whose work was pure science fiction at the time but surprisingly prophetic about future developments such as multi-stage rockets and space- station communities.
Personal stories
The Soviet launch of the pioneer artificial satellite Sputnik 1 was only the beginning of a series of Russian space firsts that amazed the world, particularly the Americans.
The first dog in space (Laika on Sputnik 2 in 1957), the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon (Luna 2, 1959), the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin, Vostok 1, 1961), the first woman in orbit (Valentina Tereshkova, Vostok 6, 1963) and the first spacewalk (Alexei Leonov, Voskhod 2, 1965).
It was only with the Apollo programme and Nasa successfully landing men on the Moon in 1969 that the Americans gained the upper hand. But eventually fierce US-Soviet competition gave way to cooperation in space.
The early Russian space achievements were publicised as propaganda coups at the time, but the exhibition draws out the personal stories of the engineers and cosmonauts who were tightly controlled by Soviet authorities.
Sergei Korolev, the chief designer who led the Soviet programme to develop rockets and satellites in the 1950s and early 1960s, was never named or recognised for his achievements by the USSR in his lifetime, allegedly to protect him from potential assassination by the Americans.
In fact, it was probably the treatment he experienced during the Stalinist purges that led to his health problems and premature death in 1966. He had been denounced and sent to the gulag in 1938 before his “rehabilitation” in the 1950s. A metal drinking mug with his name scratched on it – his only possession during his incarceration – has been lent to the Science Museum by his daughter.
Unlike Gagarin, who was feted all over the world, Korolev only became an official hero of the Soviet Union after his death, which ended Russian hopes of beating the Americans at being the first to walk on the moon.
Russian secrets
The exhibition features objects ranging from a 1950s ejection seat and space suit for a dog, to an elaborate samovar in the shape of Sputnik 1, shiny large-scale engineering models of early Soviet spacecraft and the scorched and remarkably small Vostok 6 module.
This was the cramped capsule in which Valentina Tereshkova spent three days circling the Earth in June 1963. That mission made her the first civilian in space and she remains the only woman to have flown a solo space mission.
The USSR kept the details and appearance of the Vostok capsule secret until 1965, when it was first displayed in Moscow without its aerodynamic nose cone that conceals the spherical capsule, and with fake fins on the launch section to confuse western observers.
Tereshkova, who is now an elected member of the Russian State Duma (lower house of parliament), was a guest of honour at the press launch of the Science Museum exhibition, where she revealed more information that was kept secret at the time of her flight.
It emerged that the Soviet engineers had forgotten a key provision when she was launched – she had food, water and toothpaste but no toothbrush. Asked how she coped, she said: “I was very resourceful, as any woman would be. I had my hands and I had water.”
But she added that this was nothing compared with a serious engineering error that made her spacecraft continue ascending rather than eventually descending to earth. She nearly spun off into outer space: “But I discovered the mistake, reported it to ground control and we corrected it.”
Tereshkova said she implored Korolev not to punish the engineer who had nearly sealed her fate. “He said ‘I want your word you would never tell anyone about it, especially journalists’, so I kept the secret for 30 years whereas the engineer himself told the whole world. Cosmonauts can keep their word – both men and women – particularly women.”
Sergei Krikalev, a veteran of six space flights and eight space walks, was also at the launch of the exhibition. Apart from his remarkable space endurance records, he is famous for being in orbit in a space station when the Soviet Union was dissolved and turned into the Russian Federation in 1991.
“Our operations in space were more stable than what was happening down on Earth,” he said at the exhibition’s launch.
The content of Cosmonauts is on an epic scale, literally taking us out of this world but never forgetting the human foibles and exceptional courage of the individuals involved in space exploration.
"It left me full of wonder and wanting to discover more. The exhibition uses a beautifully designed mix of unique objects, still images, film, sound, and short but succinct text to convey the narrative that does not overload visitors with dull technicalities.
The book, a blog, retail products and an interesting series of talks and related events combine to make a wide-ranging programme that should appeal to diverse audiences.
I worried for years about the Science Museum’s apparently aimless drift into becoming just another science centre dominated by interactive digital displays, with few collections on show. But we are seeing a new direction and an intelligent masterplan – it began with the Information Age gallery that opened last year and is now manifest in this exceptional exhibition. This is exactly what a national museum should be doing.
Oliver Green is an independent curator and historian
Cosmonauts is the most logistically challenging exhibition the Science Museum has undertaken.
We have borrowed a number of flown spacecraft from closed military enterprises in the Russian Space Agency for the display, many of which have never been seen by Russians, let alone left Russia.
These institutions have never lent their artefacts before and there is a security clearance process required even to view them.
Due to their sheer size and weight, many of the spacecraft, including the huge five-metre- tall LK3 lunar lander, had to be dismantled into smaller components for transportation from Moscow and even then were too large to fit on any aircraft.
Instead, they were transported in 20-metre-long, four-tonne trucks by road from Moscow to Helsinki, and then by cargo ferry to the UK.
On arrival at the museum a week later, the spacecraft were unloaded from each truck by crane. We had to carefully plan the route through the museum and move several showcases and other furniture in preparation.
The spacecraft were carefully hoisted up to the first floor of the museum from the main atrium.
Those that had been dismantled for transport were reassembled in the gallery using gantries and the expertise of an external rigging company, as well as engineers who travelled from Moscow.
It was a huge team effort to get these objects on display and we are proud of the Cosmonauts exhibition.
Emma Smith is the assistant curator for the Cosmonauts exhibition
Lead curator: Doug Millard Principal funder: BP Exhibition design: Real Studios
Main contractor: The Hub Limited
2D design: Kellenberger-White Rigging contractor: Unusual Rigging Exhibition ends 13 March 2016.
The Cosmonauts exhibition is both revelatory and revolutionary for the Science Museum. It is a revelation because it displays for the first time an astonishing collection of space artefacts that has never been seen outside Russia and gives us a new perspective on the space race of the 1950s and 1960s.
And it is a revolution because it is the first major loan exhibition of this kind that our national museum of science and industry has mounted, and is the closest it has come to the blockbusters we now expect from the British Museum, Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Ian Blatchford, the director of the Science Museum, says that it took five years of research, planning and negotiation, and involved more than 200 curators, scientists and space experts to develop the exhibition. “We’ve never been mad enough to put on anything on this scale,” he said at the opening.
With the delicate state of our diplomatic relationship with Russia, it is surprising that the project came to fruition at all, but the result is a spectacular success.
Cosmonauts is tactfully subtitled Birth of the Space Age, distinguishing it from the linked BBC television programme of the same name, which has the tagline How Russia Won the Space Race.
The exhibition and the film do the same thing: dramatically rebalance our knowledge and assumptions about recent history by leaving the US side of the story out of the picture for once and revealing a great deal that we (and the Russian people) have never been able to see and talk about before.
Even now, years after the end of the original space race in the 1970s, it is a sobering thought that an exhibition such as this would probably not be possible in Russia or the US. The old ideological propaganda narratives of Nasa and the Soviet Union are still too strongly embedded in the national psyches of both countries.
This makes the Science Museum’s achievement all the more extraordinary. It has only been possible through the unprecedented cooperation of key individuals and agencies in Britain and Russia, which made this the final outcome of the 2014 Russia-UK Year of Culture, something you may have blinked and missed.
As Blatchford explains in his foreword to the superb book that accompanies the exhibition, the exploration of the cosmos has long been a feature of Russian thinking and was developed through art, literature, film and architectural design long before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first spacecraft, in 1957.
The exhibition begins with some imaginative concepts and sketches by Russian artists, architects and theorists of the 1920s, whose work was pure science fiction at the time but surprisingly prophetic about future developments such as multi-stage rockets and space- station communities.
Personal stories
The Soviet launch of the pioneer artificial satellite Sputnik 1 was only the beginning of a series of Russian space firsts that amazed the world, particularly the Americans.
The first dog in space (Laika on Sputnik 2 in 1957), the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon (Luna 2, 1959), the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin, Vostok 1, 1961), the first woman in orbit (Valentina Tereshkova, Vostok 6, 1963) and the first spacewalk (Alexei Leonov, Voskhod 2, 1965).
It was only with the Apollo programme and Nasa successfully landing men on the Moon in 1969 that the Americans gained the upper hand. But eventually fierce US-Soviet competition gave way to cooperation in space.
The early Russian space achievements were publicised as propaganda coups at the time, but the exhibition draws out the personal stories of the engineers and cosmonauts who were tightly controlled by Soviet authorities.
Sergei Korolev, the chief designer who led the Soviet programme to develop rockets and satellites in the 1950s and early 1960s, was never named or recognised for his achievements by the USSR in his lifetime, allegedly to protect him from potential assassination by the Americans.
In fact, it was probably the treatment he experienced during the Stalinist purges that led to his health problems and premature death in 1966. He had been denounced and sent to the gulag in 1938 before his “rehabilitation” in the 1950s. A metal drinking mug with his name scratched on it – his only possession during his incarceration – has been lent to the Science Museum by his daughter.
Unlike Gagarin, who was feted all over the world, Korolev only became an official hero of the Soviet Union after his death, which ended Russian hopes of beating the Americans at being the first to walk on the moon.
Russian secrets
The exhibition features objects ranging from a 1950s ejection seat and space suit for a dog, to an elaborate samovar in the shape of Sputnik 1, shiny large-scale engineering models of early Soviet spacecraft and the scorched and remarkably small Vostok 6 module.
This was the cramped capsule in which Valentina Tereshkova spent three days circling the Earth in June 1963. That mission made her the first civilian in space and she remains the only woman to have flown a solo space mission.
The USSR kept the details and appearance of the Vostok capsule secret until 1965, when it was first displayed in Moscow without its aerodynamic nose cone that conceals the spherical capsule, and with fake fins on the launch section to confuse western observers.
Tereshkova, who is now an elected member of the Russian State Duma (lower house of parliament), was a guest of honour at the press launch of the Science Museum exhibition, where she revealed more information that was kept secret at the time of her flight.
It emerged that the Soviet engineers had forgotten a key provision when she was launched – she had food, water and toothpaste but no toothbrush. Asked how she coped, she said: “I was very resourceful, as any woman would be. I had my hands and I had water.”
But she added that this was nothing compared with a serious engineering error that made her spacecraft continue ascending rather than eventually descending to earth. She nearly spun off into outer space: “But I discovered the mistake, reported it to ground control and we corrected it.”
Tereshkova said she implored Korolev not to punish the engineer who had nearly sealed her fate. “He said ‘I want your word you would never tell anyone about it, especially journalists’, so I kept the secret for 30 years whereas the engineer himself told the whole world. Cosmonauts can keep their word – both men and women – particularly women.”
Sergei Krikalev, a veteran of six space flights and eight space walks, was also at the launch of the exhibition. Apart from his remarkable space endurance records, he is famous for being in orbit in a space station when the Soviet Union was dissolved and turned into the Russian Federation in 1991.
“Our operations in space were more stable than what was happening down on Earth,” he said at the exhibition’s launch.
The content of Cosmonauts is on an epic scale, literally taking us out of this world but never forgetting the human foibles and exceptional courage of the individuals involved in space exploration.
"It left me full of wonder and wanting to discover more. The exhibition uses a beautifully designed mix of unique objects, still images, film, sound, and short but succinct text to convey the narrative that does not overload visitors with dull technicalities.
The book, a blog, retail products and an interesting series of talks and related events combine to make a wide-ranging programme that should appeal to diverse audiences.
I worried for years about the Science Museum’s apparently aimless drift into becoming just another science centre dominated by interactive digital displays, with few collections on show. But we are seeing a new direction and an intelligent masterplan – it began with the Information Age gallery that opened last year and is now manifest in this exceptional exhibition. This is exactly what a national museum should be doing.
Oliver Green is an independent curator and historian
Focus on installation
Cosmonauts is the most logistically challenging exhibition the Science Museum has undertaken.
We have borrowed a number of flown spacecraft from closed military enterprises in the Russian Space Agency for the display, many of which have never been seen by Russians, let alone left Russia.
These institutions have never lent their artefacts before and there is a security clearance process required even to view them.
Due to their sheer size and weight, many of the spacecraft, including the huge five-metre- tall LK3 lunar lander, had to be dismantled into smaller components for transportation from Moscow and even then were too large to fit on any aircraft.
Instead, they were transported in 20-metre-long, four-tonne trucks by road from Moscow to Helsinki, and then by cargo ferry to the UK.
On arrival at the museum a week later, the spacecraft were unloaded from each truck by crane. We had to carefully plan the route through the museum and move several showcases and other furniture in preparation.
The spacecraft were carefully hoisted up to the first floor of the museum from the main atrium.
Those that had been dismantled for transport were reassembled in the gallery using gantries and the expertise of an external rigging company, as well as engineers who travelled from Moscow.
It was a huge team effort to get these objects on display and we are proud of the Cosmonauts exhibition.
Emma Smith is the assistant curator for the Cosmonauts exhibition
Project data
Lead curator: Doug Millard Principal funder: BP Exhibition design: Real Studios
Main contractor: The Hub Limited
2D design: Kellenberger-White Rigging contractor: Unusual Rigging Exhibition ends 13 March 2016.
