A dramatic return from space in Kazakhstan

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine. — Andrew McConnell

You could be forgiven for thinking that this dramatic image is a still from a forthcoming science fiction epic, but it is actually the work of photographer Andrew McConnell, part of his in-depth series Some Worlds Have Two Suns – and it is very much of this planet.

McConnell began documenting the movements of Russian Soyuz rockets in 2015. Every three months, a spacecraft takes off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, a spaceport in Kazakhstan, carrying three astronauts and cosmonauts on a 6-hour journey to the International Space Station. At roughly the same time, three space travellers come back to Earth, landing in the remote grasslands to Kazakhstan’s north-east.

This remarkable photograph from 2017 shows a member of the ground crew in front of the just-landed Soyuz MS spacecraft (US astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin are still inside the vehicle).

McConnell says that “often at these landings, the helicopters would arrive first with all the engineers and support crew”, making it challenging to photograph freely. With this shot, he was able to “get into position before the helicopters came and kicked up the sandstorm”, and knew immediately it was a “special image… unlike any other landing I had seen”. It felt, he says, “otherworldly”.

Opening with Kulash Akhmetova’s poem Prayer – “I saw sandstorms – they wiped out the steppe settlement / I saw rockets – like visions, they hovered above me,” she writes, in part of it – Some Worlds Have Two Suns is out on 4 October.