October 4th is one of my favorite days of the year for one awesome reason – it’s the day in 1958 where the Soviet Union successfully orbited the worlds first satellite – Sputnik 1. The first in a string of amazing achievements for humanity (not just on a national level) and our first steps out …
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Tag:USSR
50 Years Ago: The Death Of Yuri Gagarin
On March 27th, 1968, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, the first human in space, died in a plane crash during what would be otherwise a very routine training flight. This in an of itself would be, and is, a tragedy in the history of humanities achievements in space, but the events surrounding this crash, and Gagarin’s life …
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60 Years Ago, The Launch Of Sputnik 2 And Laika, The “Space Dog”
Today, November 3rd 2017 marks 60 years since the launch of Sputnik 2, the second satellite to orbit the Earth. Sputnik 2 was quite different from Sputnik 1, though, and not just in that it was much heavier – while Sputnik 1 just flew around and beeped, day in, day out, for about 3 week, …
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The Importance Of Sputnik
Earlier today I wrote my article on the 60th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1. I wasn’t quite happy with how it turned out, and thought more about it – what I really wanted to say with it. That’s when I realized it wasn’t the fact that it launched that I wanted to convey, …
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Chernobyl: 31 Years Later
It’s been 31 years since the Chernobyl Disaster, an event, alongside the 2011 Fukushimi Daiichi disaster, that ranks as the worst nuclear disaster in history. Last year, for the 30th anniversary, I covered the disaster in some detail. In the year since then, the Chernobyl remains have since, finally, been covered with a permanent shelter …
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Soyuz 1 – An Addendum
The Soyuz 1 mission, which I discussed in great detail yesterday, flew, amazingly, for just about 24 hours – it was a day after launch that Komarov finally made his landing attempt, which of course as we know ended in disaster, on April 24th. Something I forgot to mention is, had everything gone perfectly with …
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50 Years Ago, The Tragedy Of Soyuz 1
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 …
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56 Years Ago, Vostok 1
Amazingly, I don’t have much to share today on Vostok 1. I covered most everything I could possibly need to cover on the mission last year, and, suffice it to say, there amazingly isn’t that much video or special content out there on this mission – at least, nothing I’m quite feeling like sharing at …
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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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The Sputnik Moment
The story of Sputnik 1 is far more than just a simple satellite going into orbit. When Sputnik 1 launched in October of 1957, the United States was caught by absolute surprise. How could the Soviets beat the Americans into putting up an artificial Satellite? What did this mean they could do next? What would …
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59 Years Ago, Sputnik 1
It was 59 years ago today that the world entered the Space Age. On the desert steppes of Soviet Kazakhstan, early in the morning of October 5th (local time October 4th here in the United States) 1957, deep within a missile test range, an R-7 missile took flight. This wouldn’t be a normal flight for …
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Life On The Space Station Mir
The Russian Space Station Mir orbited the Earth from 1986 until 2001. Over that time, it served as ever-expanding space laboratory where research on a wide variety of subjects was conducted. The legacy of the Salyut space station series before it, Mir was designed with multiple berthing ports for expansion modules, allowing for more specialized …
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55 Years Ago, The Flight of Vostok 1
The year was 1961. The Cold war was at it’s peak intensity, and both the Soviet Union and the United States were rushing to prove their technological superiority by putting a human into space. It was 3 years since Sputnik, since Explorer 1, and in that time both United States and Soviet booster, life support, …
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The Chernobyl Disaster: 27 years later
It was during the early morning hours of April 26th, 1986. The governing bodies within the Soviet Union wanted to conduct another test of the backup power systems of one of it’s nuclear power plants; Namely, the the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station, located near the city of Chernobyl, in the northern Ukraine. It was …
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