Stars in their eyes | 24 September 2015

‘The dominant narrative of space,’ I was told, in that strange language curators employ, ‘is America.’ Quite so. Kennedy stared at the moon and saw a promotional opportunity. Nasa’s logo was designed by the flamboyant Raymond Loewy. A PR man wrote Neil Armstrong’s unforgettable lines. Every event at Cape Canaveral (later the Kennedy Space Center) was televised, while, in the USSR, Star City was built in furtive secrecy just outside Moscow.

Tom Wolfe glorified the US space programme in The Right Stuff, his boisterous 1979 masterpiece of reportage where the cowboy mentality of the fly-boys co-mingled with the technical marvels of California aerospace, myth-making the while. But the Soviet Union’s space effort was at least as ambitious and just as romantic. It was the Left Stuff.

Cosmonauts is an engrossing new exhibition at the Science Museum. The presentation has a certain clunkiness not inappropriate to the subject, but alert visitors will enjoy a curious mix of pleasures. One, an intense rush of Khrushchev-era nostalgia (who cannot adore the New Soviet Woman?). Two, a delicious, even sublime, voyeurism. (Peering into the claustrophobic clutter of a space capsule, you are very glad not to be there.) Three, a sense of childlike wonder at the audacity of it all (how could that ridiculous thing get to the moon?). Four, and I am not kidding, a reflective mood about the purpose of earthly life. Five, the pure delight of the glorious retro-futurist graphics that the cosmonauts inspired. ‘First in Space! First in Chemistry!’ a poster declares.

The Soviet Union made science a religion and its art suffered. Socialist realist painting was a ham-fisted lie, but vast engineering projects better satisfied the population’s need for symbolism. Significantly, Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of the Soviet space effort, insisted that his 1957 Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, looked good: the little shiny orb, with its trailing antennae, soon became one of the 20th century’s most familiar symbols.