Spatial travel documentary filmmakers have been concerned with the matches – launching platforms wrapped in smoke and flames that come out of the ascending rockets. But after seeing the images of a Russian spacecraft Soyuz to rinse on the remote Stepe of Kazakhstan ten years ago, photographer Andrew McConnell was more fascinated by the unknown return of astronauts to Earth.
“Every three months, this capsule landed in the middle of nowhere and no one saw it,” recalls the astronauts of various nationalities, returning from the International Space Station (ISS, in the original acronym). “It was a kind of obscure but extraordinary event,” adds McConnell in a video with CNN from Enniskillen in Northern Ireland.
McConnell, who often works in conflict zones (and had just returned from a mission in Gaza), says he was compelled to document a “positive human venture” rather than “only misery and suffering.” Thus, in 2015, he embarked on the first of more than a dozen trips to Kazakhstan, where the manned Soyuz ships – or rather, their thirteen -land conical capsules, not larger than a car – return to earth with their own human load.
NASA’s Kate Rubins, Anatoly Ivanishin, from Roscosmos, and Takuya Onishi of Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency after returning to Earth at Soyuz MS-01 in 2016. Courtesy Andrew McConnell
NASA had deactivated its spacewide program four years earlier, which meant that the former Soviet Republic was the only door to ISS at the time. With the help of local photographers, McConnell contacted the crew that interceps the capsules after his trip from three and a half hours to Earth.
He camped with them in the pastures northeast of the Russian Baikonur cosmodrome, owned the Soyuz missions), waiting for what he called the “great explosion in the sky” that marked the reentry of the spaceship. The land team would then evaluate the impact of wind on the capsule trajectory before crossing the steppe in jeeps to meet it.
Initially, McConnell expected to capture astronaut portraits immediately after landing. (What would the faces of these people show after such an important event? ”He asked). But the reality of his return was not as deep as one might imagine: “They put them hats and give them a branch of flowers, perhaps a mobile phone, and they say, ‘Hello, mother, yes, I’m back’, ‘”, account.
However, on this first trip, in 2015, the Irish photographer came across a different phenomenon, which had not foreseen: the arrival of villagers from one of the few villages of the little-populated region.
A shepherd on the Kazakh Stepe where Soyuz ships land. Courtesy Andrew McConnell
Aldens in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, east of the Russian property of Baikonur. Courtesy Andrew McConnell
“This small white car appeared on the horizon and went to us, passing through the huge Russian Air Force helicopters that were stopped on the steppe,” recalls McConnell. “These were places that had come to see this extraordinary thing happening in their backyard. I was fascinated with that; It hadn’t occurred to me that people lived here. ”
Two worlds collide
Although some of McConnell’s images include renowned astronauts, such as Tim Peake and Kate Rubins, his new photographs book is more about Kazakhstan communities whose lives have inadvertently intertwined with space travel.
Horse nomad portraits appear alongside everyday scenes in Kenjebai-samai, the village where the photographer was before venturing into the meadows. The image of a young girl fucking a makeshift seal made of spatial debris shows the curious indifference that McConnell found among the locals.
“Surprisingly, they were not familiar with the landings. Some people in the village said they had seen it once and had gone to see, ”he says, adding:“ Children are curious to know what these objects are and have a basic notion that this happens somewhere ‘there’. But no one takes them there to see. (Landings happen) 30 kilometers away, but it may well be 300 kilometers away. ”
A child plays with wreckage of spaceships on the meadows. Courtesy Andrew McConnell
However, the photographer sees strange parallels among these coexisting worlds: “We have the modern nomad – the astronaut – and the original nomads. And this is the core of the whole book: a contrast between the two … The different lives we take on this planet and the fact that these two worlds collide here is extraordinary. ”
The other protagonist of the book is the steppe itself. The McConnell photographs of this “portal for space”, as described, portray a vast and empty landscape, full of space travel debris and marked by open charcoal mines.
Sometimes scenes from another world evoke a remote alien planet – an ambiguity that the photographer explores with a powerful effect. His impressive image of a member of the crew on land approaching a Soyuz capsule, with a wall of dust clouds in front of him, could easily be a distant world in a science fiction movie. The title of the book, “Some Worlds Have Two Suns” [Alguns mundos têm dois sóis, na tradução livre]and the absence of accompanying subtitles, further suspends readers’ disbelief about where the images are located.
“I was impressed by the fact that sometimes we don’t know which planet we are,” says McConnell. “We think, ‘well, this may be the earth, but can this be another world?'”
Two men on horseback next to ancestral tombs near the place where Soyuz’s descent modules land on Earth. Courtesy Andrew McConnell
Cold War relics
The role of Kazakhstan in the Russian space program dates back to the 1950s, while still part of the USSR. Situated next to the Ural Mountains, a traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia, the steppe arid was south – and therefore closer to Ecuador – than most of Russia, shortening the trip to the thermostifice that ISS dwells.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome played a central role in both space travel and cold war. The first artificial satellite of humanity, Sputnik, was launched there in 1957. The same happened with the dog Laika and Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human being in space in 1961. The Soyuz program (“union” in Russian) It began five years later and since then completed more than 1600 missions.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the independence of Kazakhstan in 1991, Russia continued to lease the land where the cosmodrome is located. And although McConnell focused mainly on the steppe, visited the facilities several times, capturing everything from gigantic launch platforms to intimate astronaut images to subjected to space facts checking before launch.
McConnell saw locals to use old rocket parts in garages, seals and coal warehouses. Courtesy Andrew McConnell
In a way, these photographs document the end of an era to the role of Kazakhstan (and, in the opinion of McConnell, Russia) in space exploration. Russian space agency Roscosmos currently operates a similar installation in its own territory in Siberia, making the increasingly obsolete Baikonur cosmodrome. In addition, Soyuz ships are no longer the only way to transport crew members and to ISS: by 2020, the Spacex Crew began transporting passengers to the space station from American soil, while Boeing launched a mission of Starliner’s manned test earlier this year.
“The investment no longer exists,” says McConnell about the Russian space program. “Innovation does not exist. If we look at what Spacex is doing now, it’s simply extraordinary. And so, this place where it all started, I think, will disappear – and that is also part of the story. ”
