Utter joy this evening to be at the Science Museum with Elaine, Gaia, Hania and Paul for the ‘grand opening’ of the new Cosmonauts: The Birth of the Space Age exhibition. And it truly was grand, spine-tingling. Complete rapture to hear Valentina Tereshkova speak, alongside people like Helen Sharman and Olga Golodets, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian federation, who did so much to make the exhibition happen.
Science Museum Director Ian Blatchford did us all proud by speaking extensively in Russian.
The speeches were heralded by the Festive Overture by Shostakovich, and concluded with an extract from The Mlada Suite by Rimsky-Korsakov. Glorious music, with a sense of a Russian Star Wars score. Found ourselves standing alongside Michael Grade and Jeffrey Archer, with Dame Mary Archer onstage, as Chairman of the Science Museum.
Struggled a bit with BP CEO Bob Dudley being up there as main funder. He noted that while the cosmonauts had explored upwards, he and BP had explored downwards. But, given that the cosmonauts and astronauts gave us such a powerful sense of the uniqueness of our small planet, it would be great if companies like BP could behave as if they meant to stay here – rather than shooting off into space, leaving wrack and ruin in their wake.
As we were offered terrestrial delights like Aviator vodka along with Russian potato and pink radish salad in mouli cups, and vodka and dill cured salmon, sour cream and pumpernickel, I spared a though for the Soviet populace that laboured on Earth while a small coterie (of incredibly brave people) were launched into space.
The highlight of the exhibition, for me at least, was the space-suit for a dogonaut. Poor beast. As to legitimacy of some of the photographs here, hmmm. I had asked a security guard if it was OK if I used camera without flash, and he said it was. The images shown are those taken before he came around later on to tell me it was not allowed …
Mental note to send a message to Jerry Linenger, a member of our Advisory Board (see his comment below), who was both an Astronaut and a Cosmonaut, and spent five months on the Mir space station. What these people did beggars the imagination, but set the scene for the modern environmental and sustainability movements.
Nice to see my cosmonaut friends out and about. We all need to keep space exploration in the forefront–inspiration for all the people of planet earth. Coincidentally, I just returned from a lecture/presentation by Carl Ganter, Circle of Blue, focusing on global freshwater issues. During the presentation, Carl used some photos that I had taken from space, emphasizing that we are all in this together on our Circle of Blue planet, all facing the same challenges Easy to see from that perspective. Thanks, John for this post. U.S. Astronaut/Mir cosmonaut Jerry Linenger.