Last summer I made a space exploration-themed trip to Russia and Kazakhstan.
I went to Moscow where I visited the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, and the famous Star City (Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center) where every man or woman sent to space has to train.
Then I took a flight to Baikonur where I could attend the launch of the Soyuz MS-05 mission which transported three astronauts/cosmonauts (Sergey Ryazansky, a Russian, Paolo Nespoli, an Italian, and Randy Bresnik, an American) to the International Space Station.
I took lot of pics and videos.
Here is a little kind of trailer I made from some of the videos I shot in Baikonur :
• Video Link
Now, let's start by the pics of the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics. The museum is of course focused on Soviet and Russian space exploration. It's very interesting because the general public often sums up their achievements to the first satellite in space (Sputnik) and the first human in space (Gagarin), and all their other achievements are overlooked, or simply not very well known in the West, because we tend to stick to the idea that the Russians/Soviets lost the space race when Americans made it to the moon. Sure, USSR never managed to send a man to the moon, but their contribution to space exploration isn't limited to Sputnik and Gagarin.
1- The museum's exterior :
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3- A full scale mockup of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite sent to space (in 1957) :
4- A lunar globe :
5- A mockup of the International Space station. You can see the pic of Sergey Ryazansky on the top left :
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7- A mockup of Saturn V, the rocket from Apollo program :
8- A mockup of the Soyuz rocket on its launch pad :
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10- A mockup of the Space Shuttle :
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13- A mockup of Buran, the Russian space shuttle, which only made one successful (unmanned) flight in 1988 before the program was abandoned because it was too expensive :
14- Buran on its launch pad :
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16- The signatures of the astronauts and cosmonauts who took part in the famous Apollo-Soyouz mission in 1975 :
17- A full scale mockup of Kosmos 1514 satellite (or Bion 6) sent in 1983 :
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19- A full scale mockup of Luna 16, the first probe to take back automatically a lunar ground sample to Earth (1970) :
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21- A full scale mockup of Lunokhod, the first remote-controlled rover to move on the surface of another astronomical object. It's a bit like the grandfather of all these rovers we have sent to Mars since then. It explored the Moon's surface from november 1970 to september 1971 :
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23- Pics of all the Soviet and Russian cosmonauts :
24- A full-scale mockup of Venera-1, the first ever probe sent to Venus (1961) :
25- A mockup of Mir Space Station :
26- A full scale mockup of a Mir module (you can walk in) :
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30- Yuri Gagarin, first man in space (1961) :
31- Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space (1963) :
32- Alexey Leonov, first human to conduct an extravehicular activity in space (1965) :
33- Vladimir Komarov, first man to lose his life during a space mission (1967) :
34- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, one of the founding fathers of astronautics :
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Next episode : Star City !