Design for the interior of the Mir space station

During the thirty years she worked in the Soviet Space Program, architect Galina Balashova (Moscow, 1931) managed to add beauty and harmony to the high-technology world of spacecrafts, laboratories, and survival equipments. After the launch in 1951 of the Sputnik, the first satellite in space, and the first flight of Yuri Gargarin in 1961, the USSR entered the tense competition for spaceflight supremacy. It was in this atmosphere that Balashova developed her projects for the Soyuz capsules, the Mir and Salyut space stations, and the Buran spacecraft. Her designs, kept secret until she retired in 1991, had something that constructivists had always pursued: a style beyond gravity... [+]