Text transcript
Secret Dawn, The Story
Leningrad · October 1985
An envelope on a locked-room desk. No stamp, no sender.
A professor of epigenetics is summoned by an office with no name on the door.
Baikonur · the secret cosmodrome
A launch site misnamed and misplaced on every map.
From here every Soviet cosmonaut has left the Earth, behind a wall of state secrecy.
12 April 1961
'Poyekhali!', Let's go.
Yuri Gagarin is the first human in space. The programme that launched him keeps its designers anonymous.
1962 · five women
Five women are trained in secret to fly.
Only Tereshkova launches, for the front pages. The rest are kept, as one wrote, 'as spares.'
The Institute of Biomedical Problems
An institute for the body at the edge of the possible.
Bone loss, radiation, the psychology of confinement, the real science of living in orbit.
Almaz · flown as 'Salyut'
A military station carrying a cannon.
The only weapon ever fired in orbit, its true purpose classified for decades.
Mir · 1986–2001
A home in orbit, module by module.
Cosmonauts learn to live in space for months, then more than a year, a rehearsal for Mars.
The classified experiment
A study of intimacy the crew must never understand.
'Taynyi Rozovyi Rassvet', the secret rose dawn. Invented. But built on a real and documented silence.
1994–1995 · 437 days
A physician spends a year and two months in orbit.
Valeri Polyakov charts the frontier of human endurance, writing it, he said, in his own bones.
Isolation on the ground
Sealed crews, months of confinement, real hazards.
SFINCSS and Mars-500 revealed the human dangers of intimacy in closed crews that agencies had avoided naming.
\u201CThe Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.\u201D