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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]