Soviet space program
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Soviet space program (Russian: Космическая программа СССР, Kosmicheskaya programma SSSR) comprised several of the rocket and space exploration programs conducted by the Soviet Union (USSR) from the 1930s until its collapse in 1991. Over its sixty-year history, this primarily classified military program was responsible for a number of pioneering accomplishments in space flight, including the first intercontinental ballistic missile (R-7), first satellite (Sputnik 1), first animal in Earth orbit (the dog Laika on Sputnik 2), first human in space and Earth orbit (cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1), first woman in space and Earth orbit (cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova on Vostok 6), first spacewalk (cosmonaut Alexey Leonov on Voskhod 2), first Moon impact (Luna 2), first image of the far side of the moon (Luna 3) and unmanned lunar soft landing (Luna 9), first space rover (Lunokhod 1), first sample of lunar soil automatically extracted and brought to Earth (Luna 16), and first space station (Salyut 1). Further notable records included the first interplanetary probes: Venera 1 and Mars 1 to fly by Venus and Mars, respectively, Venera 3 and Mars 2 to impact the respective planet surface, and Venera 7 and Mars 3 to make soft landings on these planets.
See also
- Boris Chertok, chief designer of guidance and control systems
- The list of Russian aerospace engineers
- Pilot-Cosmonaut of the USSR, an honorary title
- The list of cosmonauts
- The list of Russian explorers
- The Soviet manned lunar programs
- Intercosmos, a Soviet space program designed to give nations on friendly relations with the Soviet Union access to manned and unmanned space missions
- The Sheldon names, which were used to identify launch vehicles of the Soviet Union when their Soviet names were unknown in the USA
- DRAKON, an algorithmic visual programming language developed for the Buran space project.
- Tank on the Moon, a 2007 French documentary film on the Lunokhod programme
