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Leicester

October 2015 at the National Space Centre in Leicester: a Soviet craft stamped CCCP, a gold-visored astronaut statue and a British Aerospace badge.

Leicester was an October 2015 detour with a single target: the National Space Centre, the place where Britain keeps its space age.

A Soviet spacecraft marked CCCP USSR with a red hammer-and-sickle flag, displayed in a darkened gallery
CCCP, stencilled on the real thing. You can walk right up and peer through the porthole.
A bronze astronaut statue with a gold mirrored visor and a coiled umbilical line, photographed against a clear blue sky
The spacewalker outside, gold visor catching an October sky that almost passes for orbit.
A worn British Aerospace sticker with a red and blue arrowhead logo on pale speckled spacecraft panelling
A British Aerospace badge, quietly proud on the side of an exhibit. Britain did do rockets.
Inga crouched inside the round hatch of a white space capsule mock-up stencilled C.C.C.P with a red hammer and sickle
Boarding the C.C.C.P. capsule. Cosmonaut recruitment standards were apparently flexible that day.
Inga inside the padded capsule mock-up, lit green through the portholes, beside a control panel labelled Capsule Pressure and Booster Pressure
Inside: quilted padding, green porthole light, and a control panel demanding decisions about booster pressure. She pressed the buttons. All of them.

File under day trips that sound like a joke and end up a highlight.