Through the worlds and centuries
Cosmonauts; Birth of the Space Age – a new exhibition at the Science museum, addresses the imbalance in public knowledge about the US and Russian space programmes with a collection of soviet space junk including Valentina Tereshkova’s space capsule, Yuri Gagarin’s space suit (he was only 5ft 2in – ‘one small man for a step…’ etc.) and abandoned designs for a Russian moon flight.
The show also boasts some exciting soviet space posters which confirm that the future is not what it used to be.
The sixties, the golden age of space travel, was a time of intense utopian futurology. Technological innovation combined with progressive – although contradictory – ideologies would give rise to a society where all physical needs would be satisfied.
A world of personal jet packs, jump suits, domestic robot servants and pre-processed space food.
We got all of that (ok, not the jet packs) but, amazingly, it didn’t make us any happier.
We still have the euphoric nostalgia associated with those heady days, though.The difference in style of the competing ideologies is apparent in their iconography.
The Americans brought in top industrial designer Raymond Loewy (Air Force One, Lucky Strikes, Lincoln Continental and the Coke bottle) to makeover the Apollo programme (he gave it that 2001: A Space Odyssey look) while the Russians fitted out their spartan space vehicles with belts, braces and bathroom plumbing.
The posters tell a different story. In a bizarre reversal of their ideological founding myths, the Russians emphasised the individual Cosmonaut as a hero of the people, while NASA adopted a more understated corporate and technocratic style: space exploration as an expression of the collective will.
There was no shortage of ambition on either side.
But, for the Russians, the money ran out before those ambitions could be fulfilled.
The Americans called their space voyagers, Astronauts – literally navigators of the stars.
The Russians went one better with Cosmonauts: navigators of the cosmos.