Soviet space program
[11][12] The Soviet program was also responsible for leading the first interplanetary probes to Venus and Mars and made successful soft landings on these planets in the 1960s and 1970s.
[30] The First test-firing of a solid fuel rocket was carried out in March 1928, which flew for about 1,300 meters[29] Further developments in the early 1930s were led by Georgy Langemak.
[50][51] In 1944, RNII was renamed Scientific Research Institute No 1 (NII-I) and combined with design bureau OKB-293, led by Soviet engineer Viktor Bolkhovitinov, which developed, with Aleksei Isaev, Boris Chertok, Leonid Voskresensky and Nikolay Pilyugin a short-range rocket powered interceptor called Bereznyak-Isayev BI-1.
Although he was "single-mindedly driven by the dream of space travel", Korolev generally kept this a secret while working on military projects—especially, after the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb test in 1949, a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to the United States—as many mocked the idea of launching satellites and crewed spacecraft.
Nonetheless, the first Soviet rocket with animals aboard launched in July 1951; the two dogs, Dezik and Tsygan, were recovered alive after reaching 101 km in altitude.
Two months ahead of America's first such achievement, this and subsequent flights gave the Soviets valuable experience with space medicine.
[65]: 84–88, 95–96, 118 Because of its global range and large payload of approximately five tons, the reliable R-7 was not only effective as a strategic delivery system for nuclear warheads, but also as an excellent basis for a space vehicle.
[65]: 148–151 In a letter addressed to Khrushchev, Korolev stressed the necessity of launching a "simple satellite" in order to compete with the American space effort.
With closed-loop life support systems and electrical rocket engines, and launched from large orbiting space stations, these plans were much more ambitious than America's goal of landing on the Moon.
[65]: 351, 408, 426–427 While the government and the Communist Party used the program's successes as propaganda tools after they occurred, systematic plans for missions based on political reasons were rare, one exception being Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, on Vostok 6 in 1963.
This had the stronger rocket engine design team including the use of hypergolic fuels but following the Nedelin catastrophe in 1960 Yangel was directed to concentrate on ICBM development.
Due to Korolev's "singular persistence", in August 1964—more than three years after the United States declared its intentions—the Soviet Union finally decided to compete for the Moon.
[72][73] In 1961, Valentin Bondarenko, a cosmonaut training for a crewed Vostok mission, was killed in an endurance experiment after the chamber he was in caught on fire.
[74] Korolev died in January 1966 from complications of heart disease and severe hemorrhaging following a routine operation that uncovered colon cancer.
But after four uncrewed test launches of the N1 ended in failure, the program was suspended for two years and then cancelled, removing any chance of the Soviets landing men on the Moon before the United States.
[80] Following this setback, Chelomey convinced Ustinov to approve a program in 1970 to advance his Almaz military space station as a means of beating the US's announced Skylab.
[78] In contrast with the difficulty faced in its early crewed lunar programs, the USSR found significant success with its remote moon operations, achieving two historical firsts with the automatic Lunokhod and the Luna sample return missions.
As well as garnering scientific information on the moon, Luna 1 was able to detect a strong flow of ionized plasma emanating from the Sun, streaming through interplanetary space.
[91] Zond 4, launched in 1968 was intended as a means to test the possibility of a manned mission to the moon, including methods of a stable re-entry to earth from a Lunar trajectory using a heat shield.
The composition of the sample determined by the X-ray fluorescence spectrometer put it in the class of weakly differentiated melanocratic alkaline gabbroids, similar to terrestrial leucitic basalt with a high potassium content.
Although it was intended to fly by the planet and transmit scientific data, the spacecraft lost contact before reaching Mars, marking a setback for the program.
These stations, with their expanded crew capacity and amenities for long term stay, carrying electric stoves, a refrigerator, and constant hot water.
[130] The Soviet space program had withheld information on its projects predating the success of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite.
The public release revealed, "there is an abundance of arcane scientific and technical data... as if to overwhelm the reader with mathematics in the absence of even a picture of the object".
The OKB-1 was subordinated under the Ministry of General Machine-Building,[7] tasked with the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and continued to give its assets random identifiers into the 1960s: "For example, the Vostok spacecraft was referred to as 'object IIF63' while its launch rocket was 'object 8K72K'".
[139] The first official cosmonaut fatality during training occurred on March 23, 1961, when Valentin Bondarenko died in a fire within a low pressure, high oxygen atmosphere.
The cosmonauts were carried several thousand miles downrange and became worried that they would land in China, which the Soviet Union was having difficult relations with at the time.
To allay fears that the spacecraft carried nuclear materials, a spokesperson from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR assured the Australian government on 26 August 1981, that the satellite was "an experimental lunar cabin".
[143] The Soviet Buran program attempted to produce a class of spaceplanes launched from the Energia rocket, in response to the US Space Shuttle.
The Tsiolkovsky mission was planned as a double-purposed deep interplanetary probe to be launched in the 1990s to make a "sling shot" flyby of Jupiter and then pass within five or seven radii of the Sun.
