In December, a new exhibit permanently settled in the Metropolitan Museum of Cosmonautics at VDNH. It arrived in the early cold morning on a truck, in an open bodywork, slightly covered with a tarpaulin. Then, it came closer to the famous symbol of the Moscow Space Museum, the Rocket soaring skyward. Calmly and steadily, it went up on the powerful cable of the crane. But quite recently, the descent vehicle of the Soyuz TMA-12M spacecraft has been in outer space for almost six months! It launched to the ISS on March 26, 2014 and landed on September 11, 2014. The expedition included Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev and NASA astronaut Stephen Swanson. On the hull, a bit battered and tired of the real space conquest, there might even be preserved traces of dust particles of stars. It’s so pleasant to think that they came to us out of curiosity… And from now on, we, lovers of space and everything connected with it, will be able to take a closer look at the scientific and practical ship, which has become a museum exhibit. It can be found at the eloquent address: 111 Prospekt Mira.
Dear friends, please note, that there is a descent vehicle of the Soyuz MS-05 transport manned spacecraft with its own space history in the collection of The Vadim Zadorozhny Vehicle Museum: on July 28, 2017, it was launched on a Soyuz-FG carrier rocket from "Gagarin Launch" launch pad No. 1 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Sergei Ryazansky, Randolph Breznik, and Paolo Nespoli flew to the ISS on the ship. The expedition lasted 138 days, 16 hours, 56 minutes and 37 seconds!
Within the walls of the world's first exposition site dedicated to space - in the Kaluga Museum of the History of Cosmonautics named after K.E. Tsiolkovsky (which has become the "home" of The International Space Film Festival Tsiolkovsky since 2020), you can see the descent vehicle of the Soyuz 34 spacecraft. It became an exhibit in 1982, after a unique flight to the Salyut-6 station. After the Soyuz 33 failed to dock to the station, and the Soyuz 32 ship, on which Vladimir Lyakhov and Valery Ryumin arrived to the station, was pushed to the edge of its resource, the opportunity to return to Earth was under threat, and the unmanned flight to the Soyuz 34 station was the decision thanks to which the expedition was safely completed.
Clearly, in all three cases we are talking about genuine artifacts, but at the same time the modifications of the devices are different, because the first launch of the Soyuz took place in 1966 - exactly 55 years ago! - and the equipment of the ship has been improved over and over again. It is difficult to determine which of these three "time capsules" is more valuable for history – the one that is older and therefore closer to the beginning of research, or the one in which all the nuances are better taken into account... The main thing is that any of the Soyuz descent vehicles is the result of many years of work of the entire space industry, a reliable and proven worker who ensured the return to Earth of the astronauts of the expedition entrusted to it.
The Tsiolkovsky International Space Film Festival is a platform where those indifferent to space - spectators, cosmonauts, scientists, musicians, cinematographers and journalists - meet, those, who can look at the starry sky for a long time, who can see the history behind the burnt and blackened descent vehicle, which, after many days in orbit, has found its place in the Museum. Join us!