Julia went to space… Before Slawosz Uznanski did

Art has always been ahead of science when it comes to asking what lies beyond the edge of the known. It wasn't Newton who first noticed gravity - it was the poets who spoke of the "weight of the soul." It wasn't the astronomers who invented the orbit - it was the myth of Icarus that gave it meaning. And just like that, today - Curylo comes before Uznanski. Not physically, but symbolically.

She got there first, because art can ignore the laws of gravity. It can go where no landing module has yet been built.

 Of course - no one questions the fact that Miroslaw Hermaszewski was the first Pole in space. In 1978, aboard Soyuz 30, as part of the Intercosmos program, he completed a full orbital mission. And nearly half a century later, in June 2025, aboard the Axiom-4 mission, Slawosz Uznanski became the second Pole to leave Earth and reach the International Space Station.

But something happened between those two men. Something that didn't involve rocket fuel, but imagination. Something that left no vapor trail in the stratosphere, but a mark in culture. Something that - though unmeasurable - arrived in the same place, by a different route.

In September 2024, the artist Julia Curylo was honored by NASA. Her paintings, inspired by the James Webb Space Telescope, were included in the agency's official image archive as part of #UnfoldTheUniverse - an international campaign bridging art and space exploration.

See Julia's Curylo photos  #UnfoldTheUniverse

The telescope is a product of imagination, intellect, and human hands. A machine created to satisfy curiosity and explore the universe's past.
- Julia Curylo

 

In her work, the telescope is no longer just a device for gathering light from deep space. Curylo transforms it into a golden, geometric honeycomb suspended in the void.

The Webb Telescope fascinates me not just for what it can do. It's beautiful - like a golden honeycomb made of tiny mirrors. The precision, geometry, and light - it's all artistically inspiring.
- Julia Curylo

 

This is not about data, angles, or lenses. It's about emotion. About the ancient human question:

What lies beyond the visible?

And that's what NASA engineers, science curators, and hundreds of thousands of viewers on Flickr saw - not as a curiosity, but as a voice - artistic, but legitimate - in a conversation about the future of humanity.

It wasn't a rocket launch.
It was a launch of the imagination.
But it was just as bold.

So while Uznanski entered the history books as the second Pole in space, and Hermaszewski as the first, on another scale - a symbolic one - Julia Curylo was already there.

Because if we understand presence in space not only as physical presence, but also as the presence of thought, image, and language - then art gets there first.

To me, the astronaut is a kind of modern saint. Someone with access to distant, mysterious realms - someone who sees a little more than we do here on Earth.
- Julia Curylo

 

We need both kinds of flight. We need Julia, and we need Slawosz. We need imagination and technology, the brush and the spacesuit, the gallery and the lab. Only together can they form a complete image of human presence in the cosmos.

Hermaszewski gave us pride. Uznanski gives us science. Curylo gives us a language for the cosmos - before we even arrive there.

So maybe next time we say "the second Pole in space," we can add a parenthesis. A small one - but meaningful. One that says: "Second physically. But not the first in imagination." Because Julia was first - in a way that required no spacesuit.