On April 23rd, 1967, the Soviet Union launched the first manned mission of their new Soyuz program. The Soviets had not launched a crew in 2 years, realizing that to get anywhere close to beating the Americans at a race to the moon they would need to produce a new spacecraft that could conduct a […]
As I mentioned yesterday, here we have the launch replays of the Soyuz MS-04 Mission. The mission successfully docked to the ISS 6 hours after launch on April 20th, delivering its 2 person crew to the space station. Not much commentary for this one – It’s just some good views of a very nice Soyuz […]
February 22nd, 2017 marked the end of an era: after 43 years, the final Soyuz-U vehicle launched from Pad 1/5, or “Gagarins Start” at Baikonour Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, sending the Progress 66 (Internally known as Progress MS-05) supply vehicle to the International Space Station. The Soyuz-U Booster variant is the most flown rocket configuration in history, […]
With nearly 2000 launches to its name, the Soyuz rocket turns 50 years old today – it’s first launch was on November 28th, 1966, carrying a payload known as Kosmos 133, Kosmos being a universal codename for “unknown” Soviet Satellites. This craft was, in reality, the first test flight of the boosters namesake, the Soyuz […]
Today has really been a space heavy day for me, hasn’t it? Today marks the successful launch of Soyuz MS-03, sending another 3 person crew, Oleg Novitskiy, Peggy Whitson, and Thomas Pesquet, to the International Space Station. I don’t have much commentary: not that Soyuz launches are boring (far from it) but there really isn’t […]
What rocket launch article on Xadara would be complete without a companion article on the launch replays? In this case, as mentioned in the last article we have a beautiful day launch of the Soyuz booster and the MS-02 spacecraft. This booster didn’t launch from “Gagarin’s Start,” the normal pad that most Russian manned flights […]
Earlier today a Soyuz rocket launched the Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft on a mission to the International Space Station, carrying a fresh 3 person crew to the orbiting laboratory, bringing the ISS crew total back to 6, and the total number of people in space right now to 8: 6 on the ISS and 2 on […]
On October 11th, 1971, the worlds first Space Station, Salyut 1, burned up on reentry over the Pacific ocean after just 175 days in orbit, and 2 crewed missions to the station. It was the first in a long series of Salyut Stations, a design heritage that would span all the way to the Mir […]