jay_walk

I went to a museum in Russia on spaceflight and it was awesome.
And that icon is Luna 2. It actually existed and it actually went to the moon. To me it looks like an illustration to a really old fanciful science-fiction story. The ones where they still believed in martian civilization and spaceflight looked like diving bells with antennae. So it turns out that old science fiction is pretty much like reality when it was written (a lot of people did believe in martian canals still).
Soviet and Russian spaceflight has such nice aesthetics.

I love old submarines and diving bells and diving suits, they're very otherworldly and steampunkish (or whatever the variant thereof featuring huge metal structures is), and the spherical-looking space things seem to be a continuation of that, look-wise. It looks so much cooler than US spaceflight.



left: Apollo, right: Soyuz. Apollo has that look which makes me think American, and of Americans displaying their power and how easily they're getting to space. Sort of military-looking, the American military science look of some decades ago that is.
I know Soviet spaceflight originates in missile designs and I'm quite certain American does too. I do not like the look of it. Yes, they got people into space and I'm criticized their aesthetics.
The Soyuz program, all those landing capsules, look so cool. Really alien. I know more old science fiction than history, I'm used to seeing martians coming out of stuff that looks like that. What they did with simple technology. Taking pictures of the moon on film or by scanning it ( a one-pixel electronic camera).
Inside the Mir: there's those blocky off-white plastic computers with the panels rectangular buttons. I repeat: like in old science fiction. This exists. Space stations with ancient computers in it.
The early Soyuz landing capsules: just these charred spheres falling to earth. And it worked, mostly. How unimaginable it must have been, though, people in pods falling from space.

(As for the newest science fiction and current e v e r y t h i n g, I am not too fond of those sleek futuristic curves and shinyness, glass, screens, and glowingness they're putting everywhere, and have been for a while. Cars, phones, movie spaceships... Really odd, the current "futuristic" minimalistic but so overwhelmingly curved and shiny. I think when design of reality and fiction have caught up with each other and there's so much of both we need a new trend, but I'm afraid this one has just started.)
(What would I like to see? I'd like the really flat sharp new screens and the amazingly quick and functioning technology we have now, but minus the design with which it tries to highlight its dynamicness and modernness: the curves, the explosive colorful and 3d-shaded thing displayed on screens... I'd like a large, sharp, rectangular screen on a while rectangular wall. Wouldn't it be awesome if we combined the Bauhaus type thing where the only shapes are at wholesome angles or circle-arcs with the now technology? )

(The current style is sort of like it's trying to advertise it's minimalism through eye-catching things. Well that just ruins the minimalism.)