Zvyozdny Godorok

I dreamt that I was visiting Star City in Russia, the cosmonaut training center. In my dream, it had become a big dilapidated space museum, and tourist trap of oversized junk. 
I stole a spacesuit from one of the exhibits and put it on as a disguise so I could sneak around, inconspicuous. One of those hulking, musty canvas spacesuits, clumsy and heavy and trailing hoses. I climbed up the side of a soyuz rocket... massive fucking relic, all rusting and warped like a 19th century structure, green stained copper and tarnished brass rivets, Jules Verne on steroids. The ladders creaked as I lumbered up the side.

(Did you know that soviet rockets were powered by Kerosene? I'm not making that shit up. Soviets couldn't wrap their heads around cryogenic fuel technologies, so all the great Soviet-era rockets were stuffed to bursting with kerosene.)

So I get to the capsule at the top, and inside the hatch I find this gloomy little apartment, a family watching black and white TV in the dark. Little old man in a moth-eaten sweater vest and his little old wife in a shawl, like an unsmiling matroshyka doll. Their middle-aged children sat on the couch. Along one wall, an altar with votive candles. Displayed like ikons on the altar; faded photos of Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova and Laika, first dog in space. Winking avuncular poster of Stalin giving his blessing to the dinner table.

I take the old man aside and talk to him in private... he explains that in the sixties, he and the missus and their kids were scheduled to launch as the first family to go to space together. The mission was scrubbed, but he didn't want to break the disappointing news to his family, so he locked the capsule from within and carried out an elaborate hoax to convince his wife and kids that they had launched into orbit, and they have been there ever since, living off of years of freeze-dried food and life support. 

He pasted photos of outer space  over the capsule's windows, occasionally poured buckets of gravel on the outer hull to simulate meteor showers. 
Cut off for so long from the outside world, he asked me how Russia had been, was there ever a war and if so, who won? I told him that the Soviet Union had collapsed decades ago. The new Russian government was a confusing mess of society run by gangsters, who secretly took orders from corporations, who in turn answered to bigger gangsters, who were secretly working for bigger corporations.

The old man looked crushed. He asked me what happened to the Soviet space program. Extremely successful taxi company, I told him. They pretty much did all the work of flying to and from the ISS ever since NASA lost it's balls. Whenever the russians had a chance, they flew millionaire space tourists into orbit. 
And the MIR he asked? Burned up over the Indian Ocean years ago, I said. Red star, winter orbit.

Poor old schmecker was crushed. Disillusioned and tired, he started up the rocket's self destruct sequence. I clambered down the various ladders as quickly as I could, no small feat in my bulky spacesuit. On the way down, pipes and vents on the side of the rocket smoked and rumbled are farted rusty poison. When I hit the ground I ran for cover in the main museum building, along with stampedes of tourists, amid the klaxons and creaking of the soyuz. It blew up in a vast mushroom cloud, and in the split second before he was vaporized the old man looked out of the capsules windows and glanced the curvature of the earth.