The ‘Cosmonauts’ exhibition at the London Science Museum will reveal the most significant collection of Russian spacecraft and artefacts ever to be shown in the UK. The star of the show is the LK-3 Lunar Lander: a single cosmonaut craft built to compete with the US Apollo missions.

In 1957 Russia launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into space and just four years later sent the first ever human – Yuri Gagarin. The Engineering prototype model of the LK -3 was a piloted lunar lander developed in the 1960s as a part of the Soviet attempts at human exploration of the Moon. Its role was analogous to the American Apollo Lunar Module Several LK articles were flown without crew in Earth orbit, but no LK ever reached the Moon. The development of the N1 launch vehicle required for the Moon flight suffered setbacks (including several launch failures), and the first Moon landings were achieved by the Americans. As a result, both the N1 and the LK programs were cancelled without any further development.