Soviets in Space Looks like Russia wants to get back into space exploration in a big way. I can understand how they must feel being the first to launch a satellite into orbit in 1957 and was coming on strong until we beat them to the moon. The Soviets tried to steal the space shuttle plans but we found out, altered them, and let the Soviets steal them. This resulted in the Soviet shuttle getting extremely damaged on its first flight. Maybe we should have let them get the real plans. The space shuttle was really a disaster. It was far too expensive to launch and far too dangerous as noted by the shuttle tragedies. The cost of the launches might have bankrupted the Soviets even sooner. For years the Soviets were quite active in space exploration. I remember when I heard Sputnik 1 was launched. There was a panic among the people in America, many believed there was a nuclear bomb orbiting above us when it was really just a sort of radio sending out a signal. We were giving the Soviets far more credit for being advanced than they really were at the time. In 1961 the Soviets outdid themselves. They launched Vostok 1. It was said to be the first orbital spaceflight in history. Aboard the rocket was the now famous cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin who will forever be remembered as the first human in space. The reason I said, he was said to be the first was there had been many rumors later which said other Soviets had been there already but died and the Soviet Union was keeping quiet about this. The United States was experiencing many failures at the time and we were getting very worried about our space program and began to push even harder. For a while the Soviets kept getting other firsts. In 1963 they launched the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova. To put the cherry on top they performed the first space walk in 1965. By this time the American space scientists must have become very frustrated. We were late to the party but we had a plan. President Kennedy had announced a plan for America to go to the moon. He made the announcement in 1961. I don’t know how seriously the Soviets took this announcement at the time, because it seemed they were still far ahead of us in space. There was one area where we were gaining and it was in the development of the most powerful rocket in the world, the Saturn. When we look at the incredible rovers we have sent to Mars, we have to look back in history to that first rover. It wasn’t ours; it was a Soviet rover the Soviets had sent to the moon named Lunokhod in 1971. The Soviets had also achieved the first soft landing on the moon. After the first rover landed on the moon, the Soviets sent a second named Lunokhod 2. More rovers had been planned, but they never got launched. There were also flybys of the moon being conducted by the Soviets named the Zond and Luna series. The Soviets had been planning a manned mission to the moon and that was the primary reason the Lunokhods have been sent to explore the moon. The Soviets had an interest in rockets and were doing much research into them until the second world war put an end to that. When the war was over they scrambled as did the United States to get as many German scientists back to the Soviet Union, because they seemed to have had some very advanced knowledge into rockets as proved by the development of the German advanced weapons which included the V-2 rocket. The first ICBM was a modified German V-2 rocket. In 1971, after we had landed men on the moon, the Soviets were still in the race and trying to get more firsts but they didn’t compete with the U.S. moon landing program. They did however get another first and it was the launching of the first space station, Salyut 1, in 1971. This worried the United States since the idea of Soviet space stations looking down over our country was just too much for the United States to bear without doing something ourselves. The Soviets kept launching space stations and we got more Salyut space stations and then Almaz space stations. Then in 1986 they started to build the most famous Soviet space station, the Mir which lasted over 14 years. The United States had been looking into the idea of building a space station since the early 1950s and maybe earlier. It was just a dream at the time and seemed to be modeled after the German idea of a round wheel type. As time went by, we had other ideas including inflatable ones and even built a few prototypes. We started getting serious about space stations and decided to built the Manned Orbiting Laboratory an Air Force project, but then in 1969 it was scrapped. We finally launched a space station using the Saturn rocket. It was named Skylab and went into orbit in 1973. We had a second one on the drawing board named Freedom, but that was cancelled. Today we have the International Space Station shared by many nations and the Chinese have 2 space stations in use, Tiangong 1 and Tiangong 2. The Soviet Union fell on 25 December 1991. This hurt Soviet space science among other things, but Russia, which replaced the Soviet Union is trying to make a comeback. Unfortunately, it seems to me much of the advancements have been in weapons development and not so much in space technology. There is no doubt the invasion of the Ukraine has slowed down their interest in space, but it is still there as evidenced by the recent launch of a new moon rover. As of the writing of this article the rover is on the way to the moon and is sending back data as the spacecraft is flying. I believe it just became too much for the Russians to sit back any longer and be satisfied with missions to the space station while watching other nations gain in technology and take on new missions in space and that was the true reason for the rover launch. This is the first time in almost 50 years since the Russians sent a rover to the moon. The Lunokhod program ended in 1977. It would have been more impressive if they would have sent it to Mars. The Russians are far behind the Americans and Europeans in the space race, but I wouldn’t count them out. Since I wrote this article, the Russian rover has crashed.
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