#throwbackthursday In 2006, as part of a film project I was involved in, centred around the story of Russian space flight, I photographed Viktor Blagov (1936-2019), in an artist's studio in Paris - the day after he and his Roskosmos team signed off on a multi-million euro deal with the European Space Agency. A few months later I was in Moscow standing underneath a rusting gantry, staring up at the Vostok rocket that Viktor helped to design, in preparation for the first joint international flight of the spacecraft "Soyuz-19" and "Apollo"...and ultimately the one that carried Yuri Gagarin, the first human to journey into space. "V.D. Blagov was one of the flight managers of the Salyut orbital space stations and the Mir orbital complex, and was actively involved in collaborating with the US space agency NASA on the Mir-Shuttle and World-NASA programs. He was one of the founders of the scientific school "Planning and Operational Management of Manned Space Flights." He educated several gen...