杏吧原创

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 鈥� 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鈥檚 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聽inside the vehicle).

McConnell says that 鈥渙ften at these landings, the helicopters would arrive first with all the engineers and support crew鈥�, making it challenging to photograph freely. With this shot, he was able to 鈥済et into position before the helicopters came and kicked up the sandstorm鈥�, and knew immediately it was a 鈥渟pecial image鈥� unlike any other landing I had seen鈥�. It felt, he says, 鈥渙therworldly鈥�.

Opening with Kulash Akhmetova鈥檚 poem Prayer 鈥� 鈥淚 saw sandstorms 鈥� they wiped out the steppe settlement / I saw rockets 鈥� like visions, they hovered above me,鈥� she writes, in part of it 鈥� is out on 4 October.