Slawosz Uznanski has successfully landed with the Axiom-4 mission, returning to Earth after a historic trip to the International Space Station.
I first met Slawosz virtually about two years ago, when his zero gravity training began inside the VR model we had built. Watching someone transition from virtual simulations to real spaceflight is surreal – and this moment, seeing him back safely, is something else entirely.
Slawosz is only the second Polish astronaut in history. The first was Mirosław Hermaszewski, who flew to the Salyut 6 space station in 1978. That’s nearly 50 years ago – half a century between two human spaceflights from Poland
The response from the Polish-speaking community? Absolutely wild. From the livestreams to the Reddit threads and every corner of Polish social media – the energy has been through the roof.
There’s a beautiful symmetry here too. The ISS, where Slawosz just spent his mission, is in many ways the successor to the kind of stations like Salyut 6. Both are modular, orbiting labs – but ISS represents decades of technological evolution, done internationally. Salyut 6 was all Soviet-built, while the ISS is global, larger by magnitudes, and still going strong after 25 years. But the lineage is clear. One program made the other possible.
And while we’re on the topic of Polish space aspirations – I have to mention Stanislaw Lem. Probably the greatest Polish sci-fi author, though most people outside Poland only know Solaris. Which is strange, because his body of work goes way beyond that – and it’s packed with deep, almost philosophical explorations of alien life, the limits of human understanding, and space travel as a mirror to ourselves.
As a kid, I read through the Ijon Tichy stories and got absolutely hooked. There were drone swarms before we called them that, battles between Earth nations on the Moon, and plenty of darkly funny commentary about politics and science. Lem was way ahead of his time – and he wrote with a kind of bitter hope that still hits today.
So here’s to that same spirit. Here’s to Poland’s quiet but powerful dream of spaceflight. And here’s to Slawosz – congratulations, and well done, Poland.