Ukraine is a SPACE STATE. This year’s 60th anniversary of the first human space flight is our outstanding historical event. Without the theoretical works, inventions and implementations of Ukrainian scientists, this landmark achievement of mankind would have remained unrealized.
Among the legends of astronautics worthy of our respect, gratitude and memory are Oleksandr Zasyadko (1779-1837, artillery engineer, first designer of rocket weapons), Mykola Kybalchych (1853-1881, inventor, author of the world’s first jet aircraft), Kostiantyn Tsiolkovskyi (1857-1935, theoretical scientist, founder of modern cosmonautics, his ancestors came from Volyn), Yurii Kondratiuk (1897-1942, scientist, inventor, one of the pioneers of cosmonautics, in 1969 American astronauts flew to the moon on the “Kondratiuk route”), Serhii Koroliov (1906-1966, rocket scientist, Valentyn Hlushko (1908-1989, scientist, engineer, founder of liquid rocketry), Mykhailo Yangel (1911-1971, designer, created a scientific and design school, his inventions led to the emergence of artificial satellites), Yosyp Shklovsky (1916-1985, astrophysicist, author of the book “Universe, Life, Mind”), Pavlo Popovich (1930-2009, the first Ukrainian cosmonaut, made the first broadcast of sound and video images from space to Earth – in 1962 he was the first to perform the Ukrainian song “I look up to the sky… ” in space), Carl Sagan (1934-1996, American astronomer and scientist of Ukrainian descent, pioneered the scientific and educational genre in American literature and television, his father was a native of Kamianets-Podilskyi), Leonid Kadenyuk (1951-2018, test pilot, first cosmonaut of independent Ukraine, whose 70th birthday was celebrated on January 28, 2021).
Ukraine is an ARTISTIC STATE. Ukrainian art is powerful, valuable and important for all of us. Passing the horizon of logical events, contemporary artists look into the future, overcoming and ignoring conventions and stereotypes. In our exhibition, the bold years of their thoughts and reactive creative imagination are demonstrated by sculptural, graphic and pictorial works by star artists from Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and Khmelnytskyi in the 1980s and 2020s (collection of the Kharkiv House of Artists and the authors’ property): Ihor Husiev, Oleksandr Dubovyk, Ivan-Valentyn Zadorozhnyi, Mykola and Bohdan Mazur, Mykola Malyshko, Petro Markovych, Ivan Marchuk, Yurii Musatov, Volodymyr Pinigin, Yurii Charyshnikov, Andrii Chebykin, and Mykhailo Khymych.
The exhibition also features a video about Ukraine’s longstanding achievements in the space industry, a documentary fragment of a Ukrainian song in space orbit, thematic literature (from the collections of the Khmelnytsky Regional Universal Scientific Library and the Khmelnytsky Regional Museum of Art), and numismatics, philately, and printed posters dedicated to the development of astronautics (from the collections of the Khmelnytsky Regional Museum of Local Lore).
Olena Mykhailovska, art historian, curator
For references:
On April 12, 2011, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first human space flight, the United Nations established the International Day of Human Space Flight. In our country, this day is also celebrated as the Day of Workers of the Rocket and Space Industry of Ukraine.
An event horizon is an imaginary hypersurface in spacetime that separates those points in space-time from which light can reach an observer from those from which light cannot reach an observer. The event horizon occurs around black holes for which the second cosmic velocity exceeds the speed of light (c = 299,792,458 meters per second). The second cosmic velocity is equal to the minimum speed that a body on the surface of a planet (or other massive celestial body) must be given in order to escape the gravitational influence of that planet. No event beyond the event horizon can affect the observer, because such an influence would mean a violation of the principle of causality (one of the basic principles of physics, which states that an event that occurs at a certain time at a certain point in space can only be affected by events that preceded it in time). From the point of view of an external observer, anybody will be approaching the event horizon for an infinitely long time.
