Solar Wind

My dear young friend!

The book you are holding has been written and illustrated especially for you. I don’t know your name or how old you are. But I know that you are my friend. And what could be better than real friendship between people?

I believe I will hear a great deal of good about you. After all, you are the future, and the future is always wonderful. So I’d like to learn more about you already today—and in turn tell you about my astronaut friends, about American astronauts too. You’re probably dreaming about going to space as well, aren’t you? Then it will be interesting for you to hear how preparations went for a joint flight of two spacecraft, “Soyuz” and “Apollo,” and how that flight took place. But first, my young friend, let’s get acquainted. My name is Alexei Leonov, I’m a Soviet cosmonaut. And what is your name? Please write it here.

Now that we’ve met, I can tell you that I’ve seen you from space. Don’t you believe me? You think I’m joking? Not at all. When we cosmonauts go on a flight, from space we see oceans and continents, rivers and seas, deserts and mountains. We see fields where people grow bread, we admire forests, and we can even make out big cities. For example, our capital, Moscow. How beautiful it is at night! Especially when you look down from above. Little beads of lights, bright reflections of multicolored neon advertisements—like a gigantic bonfire of glowing embers. All of it is red, with an astonishing play of shades. And everything is alive, breathing, blinking, smiling… and then it fades away into darkness.

All of my friends who have been to space even once never tire of marveling:

— How beautiful our blue planet Earth is!

Do you know why we say that? Because you grow up on this planet. And we see you from space—your smile helps us there, in the bottomless depths where there is no beginning, no end, no top, and no bottom. We know that you are watching every one of our flights carefully. Sometimes it seems to us that you are with us in the spacecraft cabin—so we try to make those flights go well.