As we left the Алтаиский Край the landscape changed, flattening out from mountains to farmland. There was an impressive sign announcing this, but nowhere to take a good photo of it. I saw a sign for a memorial museum, so I pulled in for a look. I think Chip and Ken were keen to keep going, but it was closed anyway. It was a memorial to cosmonaut German Titov, the second person in space.

As I couldn’t go in, I’ll have to give you the Wikipedia version of who he was.

“Titov’s flight finally proved that humans could live and work in space. He was the first person to orbit the Earth multiple times (a total of 17), to spend more than a day in space, to sleep in orbit and to suffer from space sickness. In fact, he also holds the record for being the first person to vomit in space. He was the first to pilot a spaceship personally and he made the first manual photographs from orbit, thus setting a record for modern space photography. He also was the first person to film the Earth using, for ten minutes, a professional quality Konvas-Avtomat movie camera. A month short of 26 years old at launch, he remains the youngest person to fly in space.”

There were no Soyuz rockets for sale.