Dunlop, John B. (1995). The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rees, E. A. (1992). “Party Relations with the Military and the KGB.” In The Soviet Communist Party in Disarray:
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The XXVIII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ed. E. A. Rees. New York: St. Martin’s. Teague, Elizabeth. (1991). “The ‘Soyuz’ Group.” Report on the USSR 3(20):16-21.
The Russian space program has a long history. The first person in any country to study the use of rockets for space flight was the Russian schoolteacher and mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. His work greatly influenced later space and rocket research in the Soviet Union, where, as early as 1921, the government founded a military facility devoted to rocket research. During the 1930s, Sergei Korolev emerged as a leader in this effort and eventually became the “chief designer” responsible for many of the early Soviet successes in space in the 1950s and 1960s.
Under Korolev’s direction, the Soviet Union in the 1950s developed an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), with engines designed by Valentin Glushko, which was capable of delivering a heavy nuclear warhead to American targets. That ICBM, called the R-7 or Semyorka (“Number 7”), was first successfully tested on August 21, 1957. Its success cleared the way for the rocket’s use to launch a satellite.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union had announced their intent to launch an earth satellite in 1957 during the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Fearing that delayed completion of the elaborate scientific satellite, intended as the Soviet IGY contribution, would allow the United States to be first into space, Korolev and his associates designed a much simpler spherical spacecraft. After the success of the R-7 in August, that satellite was rushed into production and became Sputnik 1, the first object put into orbit, on October 4, 1957. A second, larger satellite carrying scientific instruments and the dog Laika, the first living creature in orbit, was launched November 3, 1957. Three Soviet missions, Luna 1-3, explored the vicinity of the moon in 1959, sending back the first images of its far side. Luna 1 was the first spacecraft to fly past the moon; Luna 2, in making a hard landing on the lunar suface, was the first spacecraft to strike another celestial object.
Soon after the success of the first Sputniks, Korolev began work on an orbital spacecraft that
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A Soyuz-TM rocket sitting on its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 2, 2000. © REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
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could be used both to conduct reconnaissance missions and to serve as a vehicle for the first human space flight missions. The spacecraft was called Vostok when it was used to carry a human into space. The first human was lifted into space in Vostok 1 atop a modified R-7 rocket on April 12, 1961, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The passenger, Yuri Gagarin, was a twenty-seven-year-old Russian test pilot.
There were five additional one-person Vostok missions. In August 1961, Gherman Titov at age twenty-five (still the youngest person ever to fly in space) completed seventeen orbits of Earth in Vostok 2. He became ill during the flight, an incident that caused a one-year delay while Soviet physicians investigated the possibility that humans could not survive for extended times in space. In August 1962, two Vostoks, 3 and 4, were orbited at the same time and came within four miles of one another. This dual mission was repeated in June 1963; aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft was Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to fly in space.
As U.S. plans for missions carrying more than one astronaut became known, the Soviet Union worked to maintain its lead in the space race by modifying the Vostok spacecraft to carry as many as three persons. The redesigned spacecraft was known as Voskhod. There were two Voskhod missions. On the second mission in March 1965, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first human to carry out a spacewalk.
Korolev began work in 1962 on a second-generation spacecraft, called Soyuz, holding as many as three people in an orbital crew compartment, with a separate module for reentry back to Earth. The first launch of Soyuz, with a single cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, aboard, took place on April 23, 1967. The spacecraft suffered a number of problems, and Komarov became the first person to perish during a space flight. The accident dealt a major blow to Soviet hopes of orbiting or landing on the moon before the United States.
After the problems with the Soyuz design were remedied, various models of the spacecraft served the Soviet, and then Russian, program of human space flight for more than thirty years. At the start of the twenty-first century, an updated version of Soyuz was being used as the crew rescue vehicle- the lifeboat-for the early phase of construction and occupancy of the International Space Station.
While committing the United States in 1961 to winning the moon race, President John F. Kennedy
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also made several attempts to convince the Soviet leadership that a cooperative lunar landing program would be a better alternative. But no positive reply came from the Soviet Union, which continued to debate the wisdom of undertaking a lunar program. Meanwhile, separate design bureaus headed by Korolev and Vladimir Chelomei competed fiercely for a lunar mission assignment. In August 1964, Korolev received the lunar landing assignment. The very large rocket that Korolev designed for the lunar landing effort was called the N1.
Indecision, inefficiencies, inadequate budgets, and personal and organizational rivalries in the Soviet system posed major obstacles to success in the race to the moon. To this was added the unexpected death of the charismatic leader and organizer Korolev, at age fifty-nine, on January 14, 1966.
The Soviet lunar landing program went forward fitfully after 1964. The missions were intended to employ the N1 launch vehicle and a variation of the Soyuz spacecraft, designated L3, that included a lunar landing module designed for one cosmonaut. Although an L3 spacecraft was constructed, the N1 rocket was never successfully launched. After four failed attempts between 1969 and 1972, the N1 program was cancelled in May 1974, thus ending Soviet hopes for human missions to the moon. On July 20, 1969, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped from Apollo II Lunar Module onto the surface of the moon.
By 1969, the USSR began to shift its emphasis in human space flight to the development of Earth-orbiting stations in which cosmonaut crews could carry out observations and experiments on missions that lasted weeks or months. The first Soviet space station, called Salyut 1, was launched April 19, 1971. Its initial crew spent twenty- three days aboard the station carrying out scientific studies but perished when their Soyuz spacecraft depres- surized during reentry. The Soviet Union successfully orbited five more Salyut stations through the mid-1980s. Two of these stations had a military reconnaissance mission, and three were devoted to scientific studies. The Soviet Union also launched guest cosmonauts from allied countries for short stays aboard Salyuts 6 and 7.
The Soviet Union followed its Salyut station series with the February 20, 1986, launch of the Mr space station. In 1994-1995, Valery Polyakov spent 438 continuous days aboard the station. More than one hundred people from twelve countries visited
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Mir, including seven American astronauts between 1995 and 1998. The station, which was initially scheduled to operate for only five years, supported human habitation until mid-2000, before making a controlled atmosphere reentry on March 23, 2001.
The Soviet Union in the 1980s developed a large space launch vehicle, called Energiya, and a reusable space plane similar to the U.S. space shuttle, called Buran. However, the Soviet Union could no longer afford an expensive space program. Energiya was launched only twice, in 1987.
To continue its human space flight efforts, Russia in 1993 joined the United States and fourteen other countries in the International Space Station program, the largest ever cooperative technological project. Two
