Future from the past: imaginations on the margins

The Center for Urban History will make video journeys to two places, which are located in rural areas but reflect urban imagination. We will travel to the Center for Space Research and Communication of the National Center for Space Management and Testing of the State Space Agency of Ukraine.

The center is located near the village of Sasiv (Zolochiv district) and was established in 1974 to organize direct government communication channels and international telecommunications through satellites of the international system “Intelsat” in the framework of the international cooperation program *Soyuz-Apollo*. Since 1975, the Space Communication Center has been providing international communication and television channels to the USSR, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and other countries. Another object of our visit will be the Lviv university astronomical observatory, which is on the edge of extinction due to property developers (the village of Briuchovychi). In 1940, the Astronomical council of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR decided to build a suburban observation base of the Lviv Astronomical Observatory. In 1950, the Soviets chose a place in the village of Briukhovychi and in 1951 by a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR allocated a plot of 3.4 hectares. In 1957, by order of the Ministry of Higher Education and the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Astronomical Observatory organized an optical observation station for artificial satellites of the Earth, which conducted regular visual, photographic, and later photometric observations of the satellite.