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Graffiti artists tag abandoned Soviet space shuttle

One small step for man. One giant step for graffiti artists

LiFTED | Marcus Aurelius | 31 May 2021


Walls? Those are OK. Trains? It’s not as easy as it used to be to get to them. A space shuttle?!?!?? Sign me up! That’s the Holy Grail!

If you ask any graffiti artist you know if they would tag a space shuttle if the opportunity presented itself, there is a 100 percent chance that person would give an arm or a leg to get to do it. It’s too incredible of a get not to do it.

Four crafty graffiti artists did just that as they snuck into an abandoned cosmodome in Kazakhstan and tagged a decrepit Soviet space shuttle that has been abandoned since it made one flight in 1988. On it, they wrote in Cyrillic ‘Good,’ ‘Before flying to the stars, a person needs to learn how to live on Earth,’ and in tribute to the first Russian in space, Yuri Gagarin, ‘Yura, we have arrived.’

This is the get of the year or maybe even the decade for graffiti artists.

Needless to say, the Russian space program wasn’t very pleased with what they consider to be vandalism. As a matter of fact, this is another black eye to the program because less than a decade ago another abandoned space shuttle was totally destroyed when the roof collapsed. That accident was made even worse because eight people perished.

For years, many urban explorers had been visiting the Buran Space Orbiter in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, home of the Russian Space Program to take photos. It wasn’t until recently, though, that anyone had messed with the rickety space shuttle. Lana Sator explores many abandoned places in Russia, and she was very displeased with the graffiti. “Over the past few years, hundreds of lovers of the aesthetic of abandoned places from all over the world, including me and many of my friends, have had the opportunity to go there - but now the atmosphere of the place will not return. A group of famous graffitists came and left their inscriptions on the spaceship.”

Sator also names and shames the artists, but mentions that they will not face any punishment because the building was not on Russian soil. It has also been reported that the space shuttles have been ‘painted over’ and will soon be moved to a museum for safekeeping.

While people can only see the graffiti pics online, one of the artists had the last laugh. “I can say that, like Yura, I became the first.”