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10 April 2010 | NewScientist | v EVER since Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space in 1961, all Soviet and Russian cosmonauts have trained at the Gagarin Cosmonauts Training Centre at Star City. It was a highly guarded military facility during the Soviet era, and even in the mid-1990s red tape made it a nightmare to visit. Nowadays, several companies make life easy by offering guided tours. Compared to the slick NASA visitor centres, Star City, with its Khrushchev-era buildings, has a fascinating raw authenticity. The highlight is undoubtedly the training facilities, where you will see the giant tank where cosmonauts practise space walks under water, a mock-up of the Mir space station and a centrifuge that exposes budding cosmonauts to accelerations of up to 8 g. Star City also has a museum showcasing spacesuits, charred descent capsules and assorted Gagarin memorabilia, including the YG 1 number plate of the Rolls-Royce that drove him past ecstatic crowds in London three months after his first space flight. You can also visit a replica of Gagarin’s office, containing a book which crews still make a point of signing before every launch. If you’re lucky, you might even bump into a cosmonaut. I got to meet Sergei Avdeyev, who clocked up nearly 12,000 Earth orbits and 750 days aboard the Mir space station. For the brave of heart, some tour operators can also arrange a spell in the centrifuge or flights which simulate weightlessness. Hazel Muir WHERE: An hour’s drive north-east of Moscow (www.gctc.ru/eng) WHEN: Open all year, except at weekends and on official Russian holidays. Permits are required to visit, so contact a tour operator well in advance. Be warned that winter temperatures can plummet below –20 °C STAR CITY An unassuming home (above) for unique space memorabilia ANIL ANANTHASWAMY LEONARDI WALTER/GAMMA/CAMERAPRESS I visited the mine to see the experiment for myself. Delving this far down into the Earth’s crust is a haunting experience. And the MINOS neutrino detector – 6000 tonnes of steel and plastic – is a sight to behold, towering above like something from the lair of a James Bond villain. But there’s another reason to come here. Far less well known but just as impressive is the mural adorning one of the walls. By Joseph Giannetti, this modern-day cave painting, 8 metres high and 18 metres wide, is an impressionistic celebration of the advances in 20th-century neutrino physics, from Wolfgang Pauli’s theoretical insight that neutrinos should exist to crucial neutrino experiments humming away today. If art helps you contemplate the spirit of science, this may well be the most bizarre place you’ll ever do it. Anil Ananthaswamy WHERE: The mine is a short drive from Minneapolis. You can organise a tour with the Soudan Underground Mine State Park services WHEN: Between the Memorial Day weekend (end of May) and the end of September
