@ The Science Museum
Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age
With the advent of the first British ESA astronaut to set foot in space, Tim Peake, there’s never been a better time to tell the space story from it’s beginning days and that’s just what the Science Museum new exhibition has done. I’ve always heard about America boasting about their great conquests but I didn’t know that Russia had already accomplished so much in getting out the atmosphere ~ the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik in 1957, the first dogs to survive a space flight in 1951, the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin in 1961 (in an incredibly small pod device your see in the photos) and the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova 1963, then a three manned pod in 1964 and in 1965 Alexei Leonov was the first person to walk in space for 12 minutes.
All this before man went to the Moon in 1969 by the Americans Apollo 11, without Russia’s vital contribution I don’t think any country would have achieved what they have in space history today. Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age is on at the Science Museum until 13th March 2016 and although it’s a ticketed event, £12.60, it’s worth seeing these historic space items in the flesh, and whilst walking around the exhibition you get a genuine feeling of actually how tiny we all are in this place they call the universe!