#cosmonauts

[probablyaleksashka]

Я даже не буду это переводить

[netmassimo]

A few hours ago, the Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, and, after a little more than three hours

A few hours ago, the Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, and, after a little more than three hours, reached the International Space Station with three new crew members on board. It docked with the Station's Prichal module. The ultra-fast track was used, which halves the journey duration and is used whenever the Station's position makes it possible.

[cupidcosmos]

Sergey Korolev with the crew of Voskhod 1, Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov

[starlessspace]

Yuri Gagarin and car.....awww he looks so cute in his matra djet 🥹🥹🥹 awww

In 1965, the French government had given Yuri Gagarin a Matra, a futuristic looking sports car that Gagarin admired! Later on, Yuri was seen driving it around Moscow..

[cupidcosmos]

Yuri Gagarin in Chisinau Moldova (1966)

[sarisinnerthoughts]

The USSR struck gold when they decided the name cosmonaut

It sounds sooo good

Tho astronaut sounds good too

[cupidcosmos]

Vladimir Komarov with his wife Valentina Komarova, and their daughter Irina Komarova (mid 1960s)

[everybittexas]

There's something quietly extraordinary about sitting in a studio at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and being a Russian cosmonaut. Oleg Platonov did exactly that in February 2025 — posed for a photo, answered some questions, did the pre-mission press thing that astronauts and cosmonauts do before they strap themselves to a rocket and leave the planet. Routine, almost. Except nothing about it is routine. Think about the specific geography of that moment for a second. Houston, Texas. A city that became synonymous with American spaceflight, where the phrase "Houston, we have a problem" is practically civic scripture. And sitting in a studio there, getting his picture taken for NASA's archive, is a cosmonaut from Roscosmos — Russia's space agency — preparing to fly to the International Space Station. The ISS has always been one of the stranger diplomatic achievements in human history. It's a laboratory the size of a football field orbiting roughly 250 miles above Earth, and it has required the United States and Russia to keep showing up for each other in space even when relations on the ground get complicated. Cosmonauts train in Houston. Astronauts train in Star City. They ride each other's rockets. They share meals in a pressurized tin can moving at 17,500 miles per hour. Platonov's pre-mission interview at JSC is, on the surface, just a media obligation — the kind of thing that generates a photo in an archive with a catalog number and a credit line. jsc2025e007980. Robert Markowitz, photographer. Standard stuff. But that photo is also evidence of something that tends to get lost when people talk about space as purely a scientific or technological endeavor: it requires an almost stubborn insistence on collaboration. Someone had to decide, and keep deciding, that the work mattered more than the friction. That getting humans to orbit and back safely was worth building systems — training pipelines, communication protocols, literal hardware — that depend on trust across a pretty significant political divide. Platonov sitting in a Houston studio, before his mission, is part of that long chain of decisions. It's worth asking what that kind of cooperation looks like from the inside. Whether it feels ordinary after a while, or whether it never quite stops being strange to be a Russian cosmonaut making small talk in Texas before you go to space.