Happy birthday International space station!

Today (20.11.08) is the 10th anniversary of the launch of the International space station.

Quite an achievement..

Above is a audio slideshow of the edit set of pics I shot at Star City, Russia’s cosmonaut training centre, where the cosmonauts were training and preparing for life aboard the ISS. (We threw this together this morning in about an hour but you can see our audio slideshows for real on the project page at www.duckrabbit.info)

“One hundred sixty seven individual representing 14 countries have visited the complex. Crews have eaten some 19,000 meals aboard the station since the first crew took up residence in 2000. Through the course of 114 spacewalks and unmatched robotic construction in space, the station‚Äôs truss structure has grown to 291 feet long so far. Its solar arrays now span to 28,800 square feet, large enough to cover six basketball courts”

When I visited Star City in Russia a while ago, as the first photographer to do so for over 20 years, I got to see and photograph cosmonauts training for their visits to the ISS. I also got horribly drunk with their chief cosmonaut, but that’s another story, for another day.

A story I will tell now however is how I got into Star City. Today, you can pay a substantial fee and take pictures. When I found out about Star City, it was top secret. There was no way in. Impossible. Never. NYET.

I wanted in however, and I wanted in REALLY badly. I knew it would make for a fantastic set of pics, and exclusive ones at that. So, I started emailing. I started ‘phoning. I faxed. I emailed. I got others to do the same for me. After 6 months of deafening silence I decided a new tactic was in order. I hired a language student at Bristol University to translate my request into Russian. I then faxed that request to the numbers I had somehow scraped together. Weeks passed, months even. I had resent the fax many, many times.

I decided to ‘phone one more time, even though I had never had an answer before. This time someone answered, and she knew about my fax. She said everyone knew about my fax. I was confused, she was angry. Soon after, I was angry, and she was confused. Apparently my fax had asked for permission to photograph all the cosmonauts naked. She was offended, as were all her colleagues. I looked like an idiot.

Surely my chances of ever getting into Star City were finished?

After a week of contemplation, during which I hunted down and killed the student at Bristol Uni, I decided I could turn this to my advantage. Russian’s have a sense of humour too, no? And everyone loves an idiot 🙂

I turned to someone I knew who knew someone who knew someone in Moscow. She was a fixer. A good one, and she thought my story hilarious. She agreed that we could maybe turn the naked mixup to my advantage.

Somehow, months later, permission came through for me to photograph within Star City, which at that time was still a secret establishment on a secret military base just outside Moscow. It had only taken 18 months to get the access, but get it I did. She persuaded them that idiots are not a threat.

The moral of this story is: always ask to see your subjects naked. It has never failed me yet.

DW.