The remote Kazakh steppe as a gateway to space

The remote Kazakh steppe as a gateway to space

The documentary filmmakers of space travel have long focused on the departures - with starting systems that sink into rising smoke and flames. But after the photographer Andrew McConnell had seen a crash of a Russian Soyuz spaceship in the remote Kazakh steppe ten years ago, he was fascinated more by the unspectacular return of the astronauts to Earth.

The inconspicuous return of the astronauts

"Every three months this capsule landed in the middle of nowhere, and nobody really wanted to look," McConnell recalled the return of past astronauts of various nationalities from the International Space Station (ISS). "It was a rather obscure event, but such an extraordinary," he added in a video call from Enniskillen, Northern Ireland.

document a positive human company

McConnell, which often works in conflict areas (and had just returned from a commitment in the Gaza strip), felt the urge to document a "positive human company" instead of "only misery and suffering". In 2015 he started with his travels to Kazakhstan, where manned Soyuz spaceships-or more precisely, her conical capsules for three people, not greater than a car-return to earth.

Waiting for the big moment

NASA had set her Space Shuttle program four years earlier, which meant that the former Soviet republic was the only goal for the ISS at that time. With the help of local photographers, McConnell contacted the crew, which intercepts the capsules after their three and a half hour trip to Earth.

he camped with the team on the grass areas northeast of the Russian Baikonur cosmodrome (the starting point of the Soyuz missions), in anticipation of the "large explosion moment in the sky", which marks the re-entry of the spaceship. The Bodencrew then rated the influence of the wind on the track of the capsule before racing in jeeps over the steppe to meet them.

surprises on the first trip

Initially, McConnell hoped to capture portraits of the astronauts immediately after landing. ("What would these people show after such a memorable event on their faces?" He had asked himself.) But the reality of her return was not so profoundly as you could imagine: "They put on your hats, give you a bouquet of flowers, maybe a cell phone, and then say: 'Hey, mom, yes, I'm back'."

On his first trip in 2015, however, the Irish photographer came across a phenomenon that he had not expected: the arrival of villagers from one of the few settlements in this thinly populated region.

The meeting of two worlds

"A small white car appeared on the horizon and drove towards us, whereby it meandered through the massive helicopters of the Russian Air Force that stood on the steppe," McConnell recalled. "It was locals who had come to see this extraordinary event in their neighborhood. I was simply fascinated by it; I didn't think that people actually live here."

Although some of the astronauts known from McConnell’s pictures like Tim Peake and Kate Rubins, his New photo book more of the Kazakh communities, their lives, their lives accidentally interwoven with space travel.

life in the steppe and its stories

portraits from nomads to Ross appear in addition to everyday scenes from Kenjebai-Samai, the village in which the photographer lingered on the grass landscapes before his adventure. The image of a little girl climbing on an improvised fence made of space waste shows the curious indifference that McConnell met with the locals.

"Surprisingly, they were not familiar with the landings. Some people in the village said they had seen it once and went out to look at it," he reported, adding: "(The children) are curious about what these objects are, and they have a fundamental understanding that this event happens somewhere’ over there. But nobody brings them up. could also be 300 miles away. ”

parallels between the worlds

Nevertheless, the photographer saw strange parallels between these coexisting worlds: "They have the modern nomad - the astronauts - and the original nomads. And that is somehow the core of the entire book: a contrast between the two ... It is extraordinary to see the different lives that we lead on this planet, and that these two worlds meet here."

The other protagonist of the book is the steppe.

The influence of space travel on Kazakhstan

Kazachstan's role in the Russian space program goes back to the 1950s when it was still part of the USSR. The steppe was located further south - and thus closer to the equator - as most parts of Russia, which shortened the journey to the thermosphere in which the ISS is located.

The Baikonur-Kosmodrom played a central role in both space travel and in the Cold War. The first artificial satellite of humanity, Sputnik, started there in 1957. Laika the dog and Juri Alexejewitsch Gagarin, who became the first person in space in 1961, were also sent to space from here. The Soyuz program started five years later and has since more than 1,600 missions successfully.

According to the fall of the iron curtain and the independence of Kazakhstan in 1991, Russia continued to rent the site on which the cosmodrome is located. And while McConnell largely concentrated on the steppe, he visited the facility several times and held everything from gigantic starting places to intimate recordings of astronauts that checked for space suits before starting.

An end to the era of space travel in Kazakhstan

In a way, these photos document the end of an era for Kazachstan's (and, in McConnell's perspective, Russia's) role in space travel. The Russian space agency Roscosmos now operates a similar facility on its own soil in Siberia, which increasingly becomes obsolete. In addition, Soyuz spaceships are no longer the only way to transport the staff to and from the ISS: in 2020 SpaceX began to promote passengers from US floor to the space station, while Boeing earlier this year a occupied Starliner-Testmission Started.

"The investments are no longer there," said McConnell about the Russian space program. "Your innovation is missing. If you see what SpaceX is doing now, that's just exceptional. And so this place where it all started is forgotten in my opinion - and that is also part of the story."

" Some Worlds Have Two Suns ", published now.