A dramatic return from area in Kazakhstan

You may be forgiven for pondering that this dramatic picture is a nonetheless from a forthcoming science fiction epic, however it’s really the work of photographer Andrew McConnell, a part of his in-depth sequence Some Worlds Have Two Suns – and it is vitally a lot of this planet.

McConnell started documenting the actions of Russian Soyuz rockets in 2015. Each 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 Worldwide House Station. At roughly the identical time, three area travellers come again to Earth, touchdown within the distant grasslands to Kazakhstan’s north-east.

This exceptional {photograph} from 2017 reveals a member of the bottom crew in entrance of the just-landed Soyuz MS spacecraft (US astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin are nonetheless contained in the automobile).

McConnell says that “usually at these landings, the helicopters would arrive first with all of the engineers and assist crew”, making it difficult to {photograph} freely. With this shot, he was in a position to “get into place earlier than the helicopters got here and kicked up the sandstorm”, and knew instantly it was a “particular picture… not like every other touchdown I had seen”. It felt, he says, “otherworldly”.

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