After visiting Baikonour’s monuments to space pioneers, last Saturday Terry, Anton and I were taken on a very interesting guided tour of the Baikonour museum.
The history of Soviet and then Russian human spaceflight and the history of Baikonour are so tightly intertwined that you could say the museum is about both.
The cosmodrome and the attached settlements were built in the 1950s. There was nothing here before then, except for the train junction Tyuratam – this is the name of the railway station to this day. The name Baikonour actually belonged to a different city in Kazakhstan and was chosen to deceive foreign intelligence trying to locate the launch site. At the museum we’ve even been told that a mockup site was built in the real Baikonour that would look like a launch site if photographed from above by reconnaissance assets!
The museum has a rich collection of photographs and memorabilia and reaches well beyond Baikonour to cover international space exploration programs. In preparation of our visit, they also exhibited a small collection of photos from our training. That was a bit of a strange feeling, actually, to see yourself in a museum.
At the end of the tour we were shown a replica of Kazakh yurt and posed for a photograph wearing traditional clothes, before signing the museum’s guest book.
Picture credit: NASA/Victor Zelentsov
More photos here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157644330297400/
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
22/05/2014