The remote Kazakh Steppe that became a gateway to space

Space travel’s documentarians have long been preoccupied by departures — launchpads engulfed in billowing smoke and flames shooting from ascendant rocket boosters. But after seeing footage of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft crash down on the remote Kazakh Steppe 10 years ago, photographer Andrew McConnell became more enraptured by astronauts’ unceremonious return to Earth.

“Every three months, this capsule would land in the middle of nowhere, and no one was really going to see it,” he recalled of the astronauts, of various nationalities, returning from the International Space Station (ISS). “It was sort of an obscure event, but such an extraordinary one,” added McConnell in a video call from Enniskillen, Northern Ireland.

McConnell, who often works in conflict zones (and had just returned from assignment in Gaza), said he felt compelled to document a “positive human enterprise” rather than “just misery and suffering.” So, in 2015, he embarked on the first of over a dozen trips to Kazakhstan, where manned Soyuz craft — or rather their conical three-person landing capsules, no larger than a car — return to Earth with their human cargo.

NASA had decommissioned its Space Shuttle program four years earlier, meaning the former Soviet republic was, at the time, the only gateway to the ISS. With the help of local photographers, McConnell contacted the crew that intercepts the capsules after their three-and-a-half-hour journey to Earth.

He camped out with them on the grasslands northeast of the Russian-owned Baikonur Cosmodrome (where Soyuz missions depart from), waiting for what he called the “big explosion in the sky” that marked the spacecraft’s reentry. The ground team would then assess the wind’s impact on the capsule’s trajectory before racing across the steppe in Jeeps to meet it.

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Initially, McConnell hoped to capture portraits of the astronauts immediately after landing. (“What would these people’s faces show after such a momentous event?” he had wondered.) But the reality of their return was not as profound as one might imagine: “They put hats on them, and give them a bunch of flowers, maybe a phone, and they’re like, ‘Hey, Mom, yeah, I’m back,”” he said.

On that first trip in 2015, however, the Irish photographer encountered a different phenomenon — one he had not anticipated: The arrival of villagers from one of the few settlements in the sparsely populated region.

“This little white car appeared on the horizon, and it drove up to us, weaving through these massive Russian Air Force helicopters that were sitting on the steppe,” McConnell recalled. “They were locals who’d come to see this extraordinary thing happening in their backyard. I was just fascinated by this; it hadn’t occurred to me that people actually live here.”

So, while some of McConnell’s images feature renowned astronauts like Tim Peake and Kate Rubins, his new photo book is more about the Kazakh communities whose lives have become inadvertently intertwined with space travel.

Portraits of nomads on horseback appear alongside everyday scenes around Kenjebai-Samai, the village in which the photographer stayed before venturing onto the grasslands. The image of a young girl climbing on a makeshift fence made from space debris speaks to the curious indifference McConnell encountered among locals.

“They were, surprisingly, unfamiliar with the landings. Some people in the village said they’d seen it once, and had gone out look at it,” he said, adding: “(The kids) are curious what these objects are, and they have a basic understanding that this thing happens somewhere ‘over there.’ But no one’s bringing them over to see it. (The landings happen) 30 kilometers away, but it may as well be 300 miles away.”

Yet, the photographer saw strange parallels between these coexisting worlds: “You have the modern-day nomad — the astronaut — and the original nomads. And that’s sort of the heart of the whole book: a contrast between the two… It’s extraordinary the different lives we lead on this planet, and that these two worlds collide here.”

The book’s other protagonist is the steppe itself. McConnell’s photos of this “portal to space,” as he described it, depict a vast, empty landscape littered with the detritus of space travel and scarred with open-pit coal mines.

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At times, the otherworldly scenes evoke a remote alien planet — an ambiguity the photographer exploits to powerful effect. His striking image of a ground crewmember approaching a Soyuz capsule, a wall of dust cloud before him, could easily be a faraway world in a science fiction movie. The book’s title, “Some Worlds Have Two Suns,” and the absence of accompanying captions, further suspends readers’ disbelief about where the images might be set.

“I was struck by how, sometimes, you didn’t know what planet you were on,” McConnell said. “You think, ‘well, this might be Earth, but could this be another world?’”

Kazakhstan’s role in Russia’s space program dates to the 1950s, when it was still part of the USSR. Located beside the Ural Mountains, a traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia, the arid steppe was further south — and thus closer to the equator — than most of Russia, shortening the journey to the thermosphere the ISS inhabits.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome played a central role in both space travel and the Cold War. Humankind’s first ever artificial satellite, Sputnik, was launched there in 1957. So, too, were Laika the dog and Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human in space in 1961. The Soyuz (“union” in Russian) program began five years later and has since completed more than 1,600 missions.

After the Iron Curtain fell and Kazakhstan gained independence in 1991, Russia continued to lease the land on which the cosmodrome stands. And while McConnell was largely focused on the steppe, he visited the facility several times, capturing everything from gargantuan launchpads to intimate shots of astronauts undergoing spacesuit checks ahead of launch.

In a sense, these photos document the end of an era for Kazakhstan’s (and, in McConnell’s view, Russia’s) role in spacefaring. The Russian space agency Roscosmos now operates a similar facility on its own soil, in Siberia, rendering the Baikonur Cosmodrome increasingly obsolete. Moreover, Soyuz craft are no longer the only way to transport crew to and from the ISS: In 2020, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon began shuttling passengers to the space station from US soil, while Boeing launched a manned Starliner test mission earlier this year.

“Investment isn’t there anymore,” McConnell said of Russia’s space program. “Their innovation isn’t there. If you look at what SpaceX is doing now, it’s just extraordinary. And so, this place where it all began, I think, will fade — and that’s part of the story too.”

“Some Worlds Have Two Suns,” published by GOST, is available now.