The New Yorker:

In remote Kazakhstan, the photographer Andrew McConnell captured the places where astronauts return to Earth.

By Keith Gessen

The Irish-born photographer Andrew McConnell first started going to Kazakhstan because he wanted to see a Soyuz space capsule fall out of the sky. At the time, in 2015, the capsule, which launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan and came back to Earth about four hundred miles to the north, was the only way for humans to get to and from the International Space Station. A longtime photographer in conflict zones, McConnell was eager to photograph something a little less dispiriting. He connected with the ground team that films and photographs the landings for Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, and travelled to the Central Asian steppe.

The Soviets started building a rocket launch facility in Kazakhstan in 1955, after concluding that their previous launch site, in southern Russia, was not sufficiently in the middle of nowhere. The Kazakh site was near a rail line and a river, about as close as you could get to the equator while still staying in the Soviet Union (not that close), and very far from everywhere else. The climate was harsh—very hot in summer, very cold in winter. Other than that, it was perfect. The idea that Kazakhstan might some day become an independent country did not figure into anyone’s calculations.

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