London’s Museum of Science has recently opened a unique exhibit dedicated to the Soviet’s space program. The exhibit is exciting because it is the largest collection of Russian space program artifacts ever gathered in a single location. It features many artifacts that are exciting in themselves, including the craft piloted by the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, and the first artwork ever produced in space, a colored pencil drawing of the sunrise as seen from Alexei Leonov’s space module. Alexei Leonov, the artist, is also remembered as the first man to preform a spacewalk. The museum features, alongside obviously space related artifacts, some other less obvious artifacts which have their own unique stories. For example, one of the objects featured at the museum is a 1959 bottle of champaign from French winemaker Henri Maire, whom after having his claim that spacecraft would never see the dark side of the moon discredited after the Russian successfully did so, sent a thousand bottles to the Russian Academy of Sciences. The exhibit then is really geared toward making the history of Soviet space travel interesting to the Western public, an effort which I feel is really and truly important. Such efforts paint a picture of the history of space travel until now as a history for all mankind, not just one race or one nation. The museum is currently home to 150 artifacts from Russia’s long and incredibly important history of space exploration, giving Londoners and London’s multitudinous visitors a chance to discover just how inspiring Russia’s space program can be. And looking back on space travel’s history can help us better appreciate and understand what’s happening right here in the present.
Currently, the European Space Agency is orchestrating a mission which I believe will prove to be of an enormous help to astronomers and to laymen interested in their place in the universe. The Gaia space observatory, launched in 2013, is currently in the process of photographing and mapping the Milk Way galaxy. It’s mission will help astronomers in giving them accurate reliable knowledge and will help lay men by giving them access to a similar knowledge through the photographs which the craft will send back. Gaia will help the human race better understand the galaxy, a realm of space much larger and much less well studied than our solar system, and thus all the more ripe for scientific observation. Understanding space, either in the form of understanding the technologies of far-off nations who initially brought us there, or in the form of gaining a better idea of the map, size and composition of the Milky Way is really important for a human race who because of the very forces of modernization that introduced us to space travel are becoming more distanced from the natural beauty of the stars. New studies show that now a third of the human race cannot see the Milky Way due to light pollution. These figures are much worse in the most modernized and technologically motivated regions on earth, North America and Europe, were these figures stand at 80% and 60% lack of visibility respectively. It becomes important to understand that as the history of technology progresses and we become more advanced, we need to ensure that we are utilizing those advancements to better rather than diminish our human experience and our understanding of our place in the universe, lest we become self-centered and miss the beauties in the world greater than ourselves.