50 Years Ago: The Flight Of Soyuz 3 – The Soviet Return To Space

The paralells between the American and Soviet space programs in 1967 to 1968 are quite strange. On January 27th 1967 America had the Apollo 1 Fire which resulted in the delay of the first manned flight of Apollo until October 1968 and the Apollo 7 Mission. The Soviet Union had a similarly bad situation with …
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The Launch Of Progress MS-08

I know, I’m behind on just about everything, but I didn’t want to pass up a chance to show a good old Soyuz launch – this one from back on February 13th carrying Progress MS-08 to the International Space Station for a standard resupply mission. It successfully docked 2 days later on February 15th. All …
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59 Years Ago, Sputnik 2 And A Dog In Space

One month shy of the launch of Sputnik 1, another R-7 missile was readied on the pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome, carrying another special payload destined for Earth orbit. This time the payload wasn’t just a simple metal sphere with a radio transmitter – instead, the payload was a dog named Laika. Laika was a stray …
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Soyuz MS-02 Launches To The International Space Station

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 …
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